Casey's Slip

by Richard L. Wren

  I’d heard a lot about motorcycle gangs, ’specially here in Oakland. From what I’d heard they’d be much more capable of murder than a boat bum. Jesus, I wondered, is this guy the murderer? Is he taking me someplace to murder me?”

  I got a quick answer to one of my questions. We went about a couple of dozen blocks and pulled into a warehouse full of motorcycles and a lot of guys in leather jackets and boots. Smitty parked his bike with the others, threw his leg over, walked to the gang and left me sitting on the rear seat, all by my lonesome.

  Now he was mad. “Fat lot of good you guys were. Me and the kid here sat in Horning’s stinking jail all night and you guys didn’t do nothin’?”

  A chorus of denials. “We sure as hell did, Smitty,” one guy replied. “Wasn’t nothin’ we could do last night, they wouldn’t let us in to see you. But we showed up this afternoon as soon as we heard about the arraignment and we had your attorney on the way.”

  He seemed mollified. “Okay, listen up. We’re all going’ up to my place, including the kid here.” Grabbing me by the arm, he shoved me toward Red. “Red’s gonna take you up to my house on his bike.” Not a request, an order. He tells Red to fit me out with a helmet.

  “Where’d you come from? And how come I’m taking you up to his house?”

  “Do I call you Red?”

  “Everyone else does, why should you be different? So why am I taking you up to his house?” He handed me a helmet and led me to a bike.

  “Red, I don’t really know. We’re both under suspicion for murder and he says he thinks I did it. He says he won’t let me go home and he asked someone named Red to take me someplace. What do you know?”

  “What murder?”

  “Some guy down on the docks, your sergeant’s trying to pin it on Smitty. And me,” I added.

  “Horning? That’ll be a bunch of BS then.”

  “I hope to God you’re right, he’s got me roped into it too. Smitty says we’re in this together, that’s why he’s dragging me along.”

  “Sweet Jesus, that’s a load. You and Smitty against Horning.”

  In an abrupt change of subject, he turned to me and smiling, said, “Bet you can’t figure why they call me Red.” I figured this was a kind of standing joke. Everything about him was red. Orangey-red hair, same color small mustache, even his arms looked red. When I looked a little closer, I could see fine red hair on his arms making them look red. His complexion was red. The only things not red were his blue eyes. I’m no expert, but he didn’t look like what a biker should look like, not to me.

  He turned out to be a real nice guy, Red did. A retired mechanic at an auto plant, he spent a lot of time with the gang, but went home each night to his wife and family.

  He took me over to his bike and told me to do exactly the same with him as I had coming over on Smitty’s bike. He wanted to know what my name was.

  “Casey,” I told him.

  “Last name?”

  “First.”

  “Nickname?”

  “Nope. That’s my name.”

  “Like in Casey Stengel?” I immediately liked him. Not many people remembered Ol’ Stengel,’ the legendary baseball coach.

  “Ever heard of Casey at the Bat?” I asked. “Of course” he replied. “You’re named after Casey at the bat?”

  I told him how my dad loved baseball and how he’d memorized the poem. And that’d been where my name came from. “Last name’s Alton,” I said finally.

  “I’ll call you Case,” he announced and climbed on his Harley. I climbed on behind him. It was much easier than it’d been with Smitty. Red was much, much thinner than Smitty and I could reach around him easily. Also, Red didn’t have a ponytail to tickle my face.

  I’d been hearing the guys refer to themselves as devils and hogs. I asked Red about it. He said the club name was “The Oakland Devils,” and that they sometimes called themselves hogs because the type of cycle they drove was sometimes called a hog.

  Like I said, Red seemed like a nice enough guy, but I was still worried. Looks are sometimes deceiving. Hanging around the waterfront, I’d heard of this motorcycle gang. Not a bunch to fool around with. In fact, downright dangerous. The kind of outlaws I’d always tried to avoid. But I had no choice, they had me.

  I asked him about Smitty. “Is he dangerous?”

  “You bet. Don’t get on the wrong side with him. He can be dangerous as hell. If you really cross him your life ain’t worth a plugged nickel.”

  Accused of murder, handcuffed, jailed and kidnapped by a psychopath with a murderous gang of devils. What more could happen?

  CHAPTER 4

  We took off with several other bikers, headed generally toward the Oakland hills, further and further away from my home. They were all traveling relatively sedately, probably trying to not attract attention. After a while the bikers started peeling off in different directions. Finally it was just us, heading toward the hills.

  We wound round and round the crooked streets of the Oakland foothills. Suddenly Red came to a stop and killed the engine.

  “From here on we coast,” he said.

  “Coast?”

  “Yeah, coast!” he answered. As if it was a stupid question.

  I was completely mystified as we coasted silently down a short hill, then turned into a driveway and an open garage.

  As we climbed off the bike, Red told me why coasting in was required. Smitty had an agreement with the neighbors. They knew he was a biker, with a lot of biker friends. He’d gone to them first, before he bought the place, trying to nip any problems before they arose. He and all his friends would coast in and out so as not to disrupt the peace and quiet of the neighborhood, he promised them.

  “So far its working and it’s been a couple of years,” Red said.

  Quite a few Devils were already there by the time we arrived, and more kept coasting in.

  Red led me to a room behind the garage which looked like the world’s largest rumpus room. It had multiple sofas, several TVs, even a small kitchen. The kitchen had the biggest refrigerator I had ever seen. There were lots of sofas and overstuffed chairs, even some recliners, nothing hard. A few bar stools stood facing a small bar, off to one side.

  Every guy had a beer in his paws. I did a quick head count. Nine guys, nine beers, plus Red and me. I was thoroughly outnumbered.

  Red asked me if I wanted a beer or anything. I settled for a Pepsi, thinking it would be a good idea to keep my wits about me. Red made a general introduction of me to the group, who immediately started kidding me about the Pepsi.

  Red smiled, but then told them to lay off of me. “He’s Smitty’s guest.” He told me “grab a barstool, we’ll wait for Smitty,”

  I was beginning to wonder what had happened to Smitty when he came down the stairs from an upper floor. He walked straight up to me, ignored the rest of the gang, and said, “We need to find out a hell of a lot more about this freaking murder. If you didn’t kill him and I didn’t, who killed him and why? Was there anything on the boat worth murdering for?”

  I decided to tell him about how furtive Mitchell had been in San Diego and about his bruises.

  “I think he’d been beaten up by someone. I also think he was trying to keep the boat a secret, he was real careful when we went to it. And something else, he made me promise not to let anyone aboard the boat except me, no matter what.”

  “So maybe there’s something on the damn boat that he was keeping secret?”

  “I sure as hell didn’t see anything.”

  “Did you look?”

  “Course not. That’d be like rifling through someone’s purse. When you deliver the boat to the owner and he finds out you went through his private papers, you get bad publicity. I’d never do that.”

  “Well la-DE-da for you. How stupid can you be? Suppose he’s got a stash of cocaine on board, you don’t wanna know about that? I think we better look. There was something on that boat that your owner was murdered for. Think about it.”

/>   “I kinda’ have. I lived on the darn thing for most of a week and was all over it, stem to stern. I didn’t see anything suspicious, ‘course, like you said, I wasn’t looking for anything either.”

  “See, that’s it. You weren’t looking for anything.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Red interrupted him and said, “What the hell happened yesterday. What got your guts in a knot?”

  Smitty’d forgotten how pissed he had been when we’d pulled into the warehouse. He hadn’t told them anything.

  It took several minutes for Smitty to recap everything that had happened since I’d brought my boat into his marina last night. When he got to the part about his being cuffed by the sergeant there were a lot of “who the hell does Horning think he is?” and “screw him” type remarks. Smitty told them to knock it off.

  “What we need to do is figure out who did it and why before the sergeant figures out a way to frame me. And Casey here, too. If he’s telling the truth he’s in as much trouble as I am. If he ain’t telling the truth then maybe he murdered the guy and we’ll pin it on him.”

  Turning to me he said, “That clear to you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  He continued. “I’m not going to tie you up or anything, but we’re gonna keep an eye on you twenty four seven. Don’t even think about trying to get away. Got it?”

  I was beginning to get pissed off by his continuous threats. “For god’s sake, how could I get away? I don’t know where I am and I don’t have any wheels.”

  “That’s the whole idea.” He abruptly changed the subject.

  “If you didn’t do it, then I’m convinced there is – or was – something on the boat that could be the key to the murder. The cops

  Have searched it, but I’m thinking that you know boats a hell of a lot better than they do. So you’re gonna search it,” he said to me.

  I’d assumed that he was going to drag me along in a kind of passive role, to clear Smitty maybe, or maybe for ideas or something. Now he wants me to burgle a police crime scene?

  “Tell you what we’re going to do. I’ll sneak you on to the dock and you’ll sneak on to the boat and give it a thorough search.”

  “Isn’t that against the law, what if I get caught?”

  “Listen, asshole,” he said, “Of course, it’s against the law. Who cares? Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’ll search and I’ll be the lookout. .”

  He was silent for a second or two, then announced to all assembled, “Well, that’s settled.”

  Everyone agreed but me, and I was outnumbered, about a thousand to one. On to the life of a burglar.

  Smitty told me to go home and get the combination to the boat. “Red’ll run you down to your digs. Grab some dark clothes. You and he can meet me at the docks at eleven sharp.”

  Escape immediately flashed into my mind. Maybe, with only Red watching me I could get away. Trouble was where could I go? Maybe a friend’s house? Maybe I could pick up a quick charter and be safe at sea. I’d have to wait and see.

  As if could read my mind Smitty told Red, “Don’t let him pull any tricks on you, keep a close eye on him.”

  He had Red deliver me to my apartment at a little after ten that night. Nobody spoke to me all afternoon except to tell me to help myself to some pizzas they’d ordered. I was never out of anyone’s sight, even in the bathroom. At my apartment, Red said he’d wait outside.

  Smitty’d ordered me to dress in dark clothing. “Think what you’d wear if you were a successful cat burglar.” What I often wore on boats should be okay, I thought. Dark jeans, denim jacket, black watch cap. All I needed was to blacken my face and I could pass for a pro.

  I tried to figure out a way to escape. I thought about the back door, maybe I could sneak out and get away. Taking a bag of garbage as a subterfuge, with my backpack under my arm, I tiptoed down the stairs to the first floor and the back door. Carefully and quietly I opened it and started to walk through. Suddenly a hand appeared out of the blackness and Red said, “I’ll take that for you, where’s the garbage can?”

  Totally thwarted and outsmarted, I returned to my room and tried to read a recent edition of Latitude 38 while I waited for 11:00 to arrive.

  One of the stories in the mag. had some pics of a trip down to Baja. I thought a girl in one of them looked like my ex-girlfriend. I had to rummage up a magnifying glass to make sure it wasn’t her.

  It wasn’t, but it got me thinking about her. We’d grown up together, and everyone, us included, thought we’d eventually tie the knot. We were very close for many years and I was completely loyal to her, having rather old-fashioned ideas about fidelity. Unfortunately it gradually became obvious that my ideas of fidelity were different than hers, and we split. Since then I’d been off girls. I guess the love of my life for the last couple years had been the sea. ‘Once bitten, etc.

  I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate.

  Eventually, it was time to go.

  CHAPTER 6

  As I opened the front door, Red materialized out of the dark and stood beside me. It was really, really dark. It took only a few minutes to get to the dock area, there was a heavy cloud cover, and the short pot holed street leading to the dock itself had no street lights. It was also really, really quiet. The only noise we heard was from a cat I flushed that snarled and spat at me. He apparently wasn’t accustomed to sharing his midnight haunts with anyone.

  When we got to the docks I turned off my flashlight and started waiting for Smitty. No sooner was the light off than a dark lump next to the dock ramp went “psst.”. Guess who.

  “Let’s get going,” Smitty whispered. “Red, you stay here. I’m taking him down to the boat.

  “Okay,” He whispered back. “Watch him; he tried to sneak out the back door at his apartment.”

  They talked about me like I wasn’t there. “That’s bull; I was just taking the garbage out.”

  “Carrying a backpack?”

  He had me.

  Smitty led the way down the ramp and onto the docks. I noticed lots of noises I’d never noticed before. Every step we took rocked the dock. Squeaks, bumps and splashes followed every step. We sounded like an army. A big army, so much for stealth.

  We made it to the boat without causing any alarms to go off or lights to switch on. It was to our advantage that this was a really old, casual dockage. Newer marinas had locked gates at the tops of fancy aluminum ramps leading down to the docks with dock masters on duty around the clock. Some of them had motion detector lighting systems. It would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.

  Smitty boosted me up onto the boat and I made my way to the cockpit. Just as I’d imagined, there was yellow police tape all over the hatch. There was another hatch forward of the mast but I knew it was locked from the inside. It was the cockpit hatch or nothing.

  The tape was sagging a little, maybe because the night was damp and the tape was stretching. It looked like I might be able to stretch it a little more and wiggle through without breaking anything. I unlocked the hatch, took off my jacket, tossed it over to Smitty and made my way in.

  Inside was darker than it had been outside. I couldn’t connect the batteries and use the lights – that’d be too noticeable. All I could do was put my hand over the lens of my flashlight and make as complete a search as possible. I didn’t know where to start. The whole cabin looked like it had been tossed. Not just searched, really tossed – mattresses ripped open, bunks torn apart, every compartment emptied. Even the bilge had been stirred up. It hurt me to see it. The cabin had been a beauty and I’d left it spic and span.

  What knowledge of boats did I have that might help me find something that the cop’s ham-handed approach had missed? As I thought of it, it seemed odd that the police had been so ham handed. In the movies they always search carefully and take pictures as they go. This looked like it’d been tossed by someone that didn’t care about preserving evidence. Maybe the murderer had come back? Maybe he was still on t
he boat? The only place he could be was in the forward bunk area, behind a curtain. What should I do? I thought I should get Smitty to say something. Anything. Let the guy in the forepeak know I wasn’t alone.

  “Smitty, can you hear me? Say something!”

  “For Christ’s sake, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing, just wanted to make sure you were there.”

  Emboldened, I yanked the curtain apart and lit up the forepeak with the flashlight.

  Empty. I could get on with the job.

  “It wasn’t easy to think calmly with the loudly whispered messages like “found anything?” and “hurry the hell up” I kept getting from Smitty.

  I tried several spots with no success and was about to give up when noticed something that seemed a little odd to me. A boat hook. To the best of my memory the boat hook had been secured to the cabin top when I left the boat. I remembered because I was struck by how securely it was fastened. If I’d needed it, it would have been difficult to loosen in a hurry.

  Now it was lying on the settee. Had the searchers moved it? Why would they have done that? I’d been moving it around in order to search places, now I looked at it carefully. The boat hook was made of aluminum. Just a long tube with a hook fixed to the end of it. I shook it. It didn’t rattle but the hook seemed a little wobbly and then came off in my hands. Looking closely I could see the screws that held the hook in place had been removed.

  “AHA,” I quietly said to myself. From outside, Smitty was still egging me on to hurry. I couldn’t see anything inside so I held it upside down and shook it. One piece of paper fell out.

  “I got something, I’m coming out.”

  I stuck the piece of paper in my pocket, wormed my way back out through the yellow tape and handed the piece of paper to Smitty.

  He was pissed. “For Christ’s sake, this is all you found, a lousy little piece of paper?”