Black’s Beach Shuffle
By
Corey Lynn Fayman
Copyright © 2006 by Corey Lynn Fayman
All rights reserved.
2nd edition Granada Pacific Publishing 2015
ISBN: 0996962913
ISBN-13: 978-0-9969629-1-9
The Mansion
It was two-thirty on a Sunday morning in June. Rolly Waters parked his old Volvo wagon outside the gates of a mansion, which sat on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of La Jolla. It was Rolly’s second visit to the house that evening. If he’d been more diligent about packing his instruments after the first visit, he wouldn’t have needed to make the second. Somewhere on the other side of the eight-foot high stucco wall that surrounded the house was his 1965 Gibson ES-335 Thinline electric guitar. He wouldn’t have been able to sleep knowing it was lying there, all alone, unprotected.
Any decent guitar player develops a special attachment to certain instruments that come along in his life, and Rolly was madly in love with the cherry red Gibson. It was a symbol of promises he’d made to himself, of changes he’d made in his life. It was also worth four thousand dollars. His car was only worth two thousand, at most. The value of the guitar was still increasing. It was the only thing he owned that could be called an investment.
He opened the door, climbed out of the car, and walked across the street. Except for the light shining from the button on the intercom at the gate, the house looked completely dark. Rolly paused for a moment, considered his choices, hoping he wouldn’t have to wake anyone. He hated bothering people and, when he was sober, was as considerate in his behavior as anyone could expect from a thirty-nine-year-old rock musician. He hadn’t had a drink in four years, ten months, and five days now. His level of solicitousness had risen appreciably in that time. Still, his guitar might be lying on the lawn behind that wall, soaking up dew from the grass, salt mist from the ocean. He needed to overcome his reticence in order to retrieve it before any irreparable damage was done.
He pushed the intercom button, waited, pushed it again. There was no response from the house. If anyone was inside, they were fast asleep, a sleep deepened no doubt by the steady flow of champagne that had been part of the evening’s festivities. He pushed the button again. There was still no response.
It was Moogus, the band’s drummer, who’d insisted everything had been packed. Moogus was a man possessed of infinite jests and a walloping backbeat, but he was not the kind of man to depend on. Moogus had been in such a hurry to leave that Rolly had foregone his usual last sweep of the scene. The Volvo was packed full of gear—Moogus’ drum cases, Rolly’s amplifier, guitars, and kit bag, so it wasn’t until they stopped at Moogus’ house to unload that Rolly realized the ES-335 was missing.
Rolly searched along the wall that fronted the street. If his calculations were correct, the bandstand had been set up against the other side of the wall about thirty feet to his left. It stood flush against the inside wall, facing the pool and a large concrete patio. The guitar was sure to be somewhere close to the bandstand. If he could get over the wall, he’d be in and out in less than a minute. He walked to his left, along the wall, stepping between the ice plant and a row of small dirt mounds supporting miniature lime trees. He stopped at a spot where he figured the bandstand would be, looked up at the top of the wall. He needed to jump to get his arms over the wall, then try to hang on and drag himself over. He took one step back, looked up, took two more steps back. He balanced himself, ran forward and leapt towards the wall.
Even in his youth, Rolly had never been much of an athlete, and the twenty-five pounds he had put on over the years had not improved his abilities any. He hit the wall stomach first, fell back to the ground. Still, the leap had come close enough that he held out some hope for success. He tried it again, got one arm over the wall, but failed to hold on. After a false start on the third try, he made it on the fourth, throwing both arms across the top of the wall just enough to hang on. He pulled himself up, slid across on his belly, dropped down to the wet grass. A dense silhouette of wooden risers, the bandstand, stood about ten feet off to his left. He walked over to it, searched around the perimeter and under the risers. The guitar wasn’t there. The rescue was going to take slightly longer than he had hoped.
He looked towards the patio and the house. The house was shaped like a T laid out flat on the ground. A two-story section formed the top of the T and ran parallel to the edge of the cliffs. It had many tall windows, providing vistas from every room. The stem of the T was a more functional one-story section that divided the patio and pool from the parking lot. A covered walkway provided access between the two areas. If one of the other band members, Gordon or Bruce, had picked up Rolly’s guitar case, he would have crossed the lawn to the edge of the patio towards the parking area where they had packed their cars after the gig. It seemed like the place to try next.
Rolly crept across the lawn, stopped at the entrance to the covered walkway, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. He began to make out shapes—a couple of large potted plants, a bicycle, the door to the garage—but there was nothing that resembled the long, flat shape of his guitar case. He felt nervous. A little bubble of gas floated up in his stomach.
He turned back around, scanned the patio. The large round folding tables that had been loaded with towers of jumbo shrimp, trays of sushi, and champagne bottles packed in ice were now empty, reduced to their low-grade wood surfaces and dented metal edges. Bits of red paper tablecloths clung to the spots where they’d been stapled down to keep them from blowing away. On one of the tables stood a couple of champagne flutes the caterers had missed. The party supply company would arrive after sunrise to pick up the tables and chairs, haul them away in their big trucks. Rolly had to find his guitar before they arrived. You never knew what kind of finders/keepers rules the guys who worked the clean-up detail might live by.
He began a methodical walk through the tables, looking under each one, forcing himself to be disciplined. Moogus had been standing out here at the end of the evening, chatting it up with a slinky young woman in a black strapless dress. Moogus’ mind worked even less well in the presence of an attractive female.
He spotted the guitar case. It was under one of the tables on the patio, as if someone had shoved it there. He knelt down beside it, flipped the latches and opened the case. The ES-335 was there, safe and snug in the velvet interior lining of its protector. He slapped the cover back down, clicked the latches in place, and grabbed the handle. Everything was right again in his world.
As he turned towards the pool, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before, a black shape floating in the water. A stone dropped in Rolly’s stomach, sending out ripples. The light from the lamp at the end of the pool surrounded a dead, naked body, creating a silhouette, and the clumps of long black hair that floated around its head made a halo through which bright beams shone, as if the person were departing to meet an alien spaceship, or riding a watery blue light to heaven. Whoever had once inhabited the body was gone now from the earth.
A Quandary
The body was skinny, delicate, the figure a little bit girlish. It was hard to tell for sure, but Rolly guessed it was a young man, in his mid-twenties at most. Regardless of age, he was dead; there was no doubt about that. Which left the question of what to do next. Rolly turned, searched for signs of life in the large picture windows that stared down at him. They were silent and dark. An empty balcony hung over the far end of the pool like an elegant, shadowy gallows. Other than the body in the pool and Rolly standing beside it, there was no sign of a human being anywhere. No
one had answered his earlier ring at the gate. But it was possible someone was watching him from inside the house even now, someone who might be calling the police. It was an expensive house in an expensive neighborhood. He might have set off some kind of silent alarm without even knowing he’d done it. The security service would have responded by now, sent in a call to the cops.
Rolly looked back at the body and again at the house. Before he could stop himself, he started to run. It was the kind of decision the rational side of his mind had no say in. His feet wouldn’t listen to what his mind was trying to say, just like his mouth wouldn’t listen to what his mind tried to tell him whenever he used to start drinking. He crossed the lawn at full speed and jumped onto the bandstand, hauling the guitar case with him. Standing on top of the risers, it would be easy to climb over the wall. He placed the case on top of the wall, shoved it over.
He pulled himself to the top of the wall, felt it scrape against his belly. He cursed his expanding middle-aged gut and slid over the edge, plopped down on the ice plant next to his guitar case. He picked up the case, scurried back to his car, and opened the door. He set the case on the passenger seat, sat down beside it, and strapped it in with the seatbelt. The man in the pool had probably been drunk. There hadn't been any blood or signs of a fight that Rolly could see. Just some poor guy who had put away too much champagne and beer, maybe something stronger, then drowned in the pool when no one had been watching. Rolly hadn’t seen many dead bodies in his life. Two, really, counting tonight. He looked at his watch. It was late.
He flipped on the headlights, turned the key in the ignition. He shifted the gears into drive and pressed on the gas. The engine sputtered and died. Rolly cursed. He turned the headlights off, made a silent promise to himself that if the car started this time, he’d take it to Randy first thing Monday morning. He waited ten seconds, turned the key, and pressed on the gas. The engine sputtered, but it didn’t die. He spun a u-turn in the street and headed back out towards Torrey Pines Road and the relative anonymity of a more traveled thoroughfare. He made himself focus on driving, discarding all other thoughts like a man who knew he’d had one too many. He prayed to God he could sneak his way home without seeing a squad car behind him. He took a deep conscious breath, full of effort, then another, trying to slow down the ska-rhythm beat of the blood in his eardrums.
He drove out the winding two-lane road, past the looming shapes of gigantic estates, parked like public announcements for the relentlessly rich, the outer walls wrapped in gnarled, sticky thickets of ivy or bougainvillea. As he slowed to negotiate a sharp left turn, a bright blast of headlights hit him full in the face. Rolly let out a nervous yelp and wrenched the steering wheel to his right. An old Coupe DeVille flew past, inches away from scraping his door. Its headlights whipped through the cabin of the Volvo like a Vari-Lite at a stadium show, then were gone. He turned his head and looked back as the Cadillac’s taillights swung around the corner and disappeared. The Volvo bumped against something, came to a stop. Rolly waited, catching his breath. He glanced into the rearview mirror, half expecting to see the Cadillac return. It didn’t.
He needed to get going. If a rent-a-cop nitwit or one of S.D.P.D.’s beat boys ran into him before he got out to Torrey Pines Road, they’d pull him over for sure. There would be all sorts of questions about what Rolly was doing in the area at this time of the morning, whether he knew anyone in the neighborhood who could vouch for him. If a rent-a-cop nabbed him, he’d make Rolly wait until the real cops showed up. Then the Finest from America’s Finest City would take over, make Rolly squirm for a couple of hours just to prove they’d done their due diligence. They’d ask him the same questions over and over to see if they could catch him saying something two different ways. Rolly had two strikes against him in any beat cop’s book. First of all, he was a musician. The guitar and the amplifier would give that one away. Cops hated musicians, especially at two-thirty in the morning.
But it was the identification card Rolly carried in his wallet that would make the cops really antsy—the one with the seal from the state of California that listed his regular profession, his day job. For in the idle hours of the last five years, Rolly had made himself into something other than a musician. He’d worked hard. He’d put in the hours. He’d taken the test and been fully certified as a licensed private investigator.
He was a part-timer, really, like two thousand other guys in town, mostly retired FBI or law enforcement, perhaps ex-Marines, who needed a little cash and something to do because forty-five years old was too young to really retire. But those guys knew how to talk to policemen, had friends who were cops, were part of the club. Rolly got nervous, sloppy, and stupid around anyone in a uniform. He didn’t know why. It could have been all those years of late nights, watching his back as he tried to get around in the early hours of the morning, bombed out of his mind. Or maybe it went back to his father, the Navy career man, hiding behind his immaculate white suit and command-level duty while his family had come crashing down all around him.
Rolly returned from his thoughts, brought his eyes back to the Volvo’s front windshield. The front fender rested against a large boulder. There was one standing on each side of the road at the entry to The Farms, like net worth boundary markers. They were imported, carved out of granite that had been ripped from the side of an Italian mountain, dropped down here to make suitably weighty and serious sentinels. The cliffs above Black’s Beach weren’t made out of rocks as solid as these. The cliffs above Black’s were made out of sand, hundreds of feet of it, compressed over millions of years. It was fragile, impermanent, slowly giving itself back to the ocean, breaking off in small chunks every day, every month, every year, dropping its leavings down on the beach, sometimes taking some poor tourist or pool cabana down with it.
Rolly put the car into reverse, backed it up a couple of yards and pulled onto the pavement. As he turned onto Torrey Pines Road, he breathed a sigh of relief, felt the knot in his stomach ease up just a little. Leaving the scene had been stupid. But he wasn’t going back now. No one had answered his ring at the gate. No one had seen him. His moment of weakness and panic was his own private baggage to carry.
He pulled the car onto Highway 5, south. The baggage started to weigh on his mind. He’d seen a dead man. Someone needed to be told. The party-supply crew would arrive after sunrise, but that left at least three or four hours to go. He’d be at the Pacific Beach off-ramp in less than five minutes. There was sure to be a phone booth at the gas station there, off Garnet. He’d stop and make an anonymous 911 phone call. That was the safest and smartest thing he could do. If anyone ever did make him, he could point the authorities back to his call, use it in defense of his well meant, if somewhat suspicious decision to leave.
He stopped at the gas station, pulled out the photocopied map he’d been given. The letters “BFH,” which he assumed were someone’s initials, were printed in ornate text on the upper left corner of the paper, next to a roughly sketched map and printed directions to the house. He got out of his car, walked to the phone booth. He dialed the three numbers, reported a dead body in a swimming pool at 1186 Starlight Drive. The operator asked him his name, tried to get more information per their standard procedure. But Rolly stayed with the minimum facts he thought were necessary, then hung up the phone and went back to his car.
He pulled onto Interstate 5, headed south towards downtown San Diego. The traffic was light this time of the morning. He ran through the events of last night in his mind, reviewing the scenes and conversations he could remember, trying to place the dead man among the sea of faces that had passed him the previous evening.
Pre-show Jitters
It had been a corporate party, given by a company called Eyebitz.com, a local start-up that was making waves, at least according to the Union-Tribune’s business section, which Rolly occasionally read. Rolly didn’t know much about the Internet or what the company did, but he did have a couple of musician friends who had gone to work at a
nother Internet company in town, MP3.com. Kevin and Rick claimed to be sitting pretty, talking about all the money they were going to make when they went public, whatever that meant. It was one of those mysteries of the financial world that Rolly didn’t quite understand, like record company royalty payments. As Rolly saw it, you never really made money unless you were standing at the top of the ant hill. All the worker ants at the bottom would keep on working, thinking they were getting somewhere until the day they got a pink slip because the guy in charge needed a new house in Aspen.
But the Eyebitz.com gig would pay well, especially for a couple hours of actual playing time, which is all that these things ever turned out to be. A company party was sure to include at least one long-winded speech, several employee appreciations and general rah-rah. There was always disorder and confusion over how long and what hours the band was to perform. It wasn’t like working down at Patrick’s on a Saturday night, with Harry hunting you down and screaming at you if the band stayed on break for more than a couple of minutes over schedule.
It was Fender who had set up the gig for the band—Fender “Dodge” Simmons, whom Rolly had known since junior high school. Fender had earned his nickname on the second day of ninth grade when he’d failed to notice he was part of a suddenly improvised game of dodge ball, one in which anyone insignificant and unprotected could suddenly and unknowingly be appointed dodgee by the ruling thugs of the asphalt play yard. Fender was tall, skinny, with a slightly drooped face like a basset hound. He was an okay guy by Rolly, who had always preferred the wallflowers and dweebs to the in-crowd social climbers and power players. Rolly had been an outsider himself, but one who had managed to carry the vague scent of cool by way of his musical skills, pulling in pretty girls and the jocks that followed them with a force they couldn’t understand, but couldn’t dismiss.
Black's Beach Shuffle: A Rolly Waters Mystery Page 1
