Black's Beach Shuffle: A Rolly Waters Mystery

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  Tangerine-colored townhouses were under construction on either side of, and over, the bar. A dozen Italian restaurants had sprung up in the neighborhood where there used to be two. You couldn’t walk half a block in the neighborhood anymore without running into an espresso machine.

  Bonnie was a creature of habit and self-enforced routine, as dependable as anyone Rolly had ever known. Every Monday for the last ten years she'd been at the Waterfront Bar at five-thirty in the evening, celebrating the start of her police officer's weekend by sitting at a window table and sipping on a cerveza. The new crowd didn’t bother her. It was the only time Rolly ever saw her drink alcohol, even when she used to stop by to cruise Joan, the sound tech at the Bacchanal Club. Bonnie had pretended she came to hear Rolly’s band, but he always knew what she’d really been after.

  Rolly didn't have many friends in the police department. None, really, except for Bonnie. He’d never felt comfortable around policemen. He didn’t know any musicians who did. They were preternatural enemies, musicians and cops, as far as Rolly could tell, complete opposites in temperament, personality, style. Cops were dedicated to order. They had to control their emotions to do their job well. Musicians made their living from exposing their emotions in front of others.

  “Hey, Rolly!” Bonnie called as he walked down the sidewalk.

  “Bonnie!” he said, delaying a little, faking surprise, pretending his mind had been somewhere else. He walked over to her, hopped up on a barstool across the table from her.

  “Can I buy you a club soda?” she asked.

  Bonnie knew Rolly’s history. Rolly suspected Joan had told her all about it. And Bonnie had found him drunk once in a deserted doorway on K Street downtown at four in the morning. She’d taken him home. She could have put him in jail.

  “With a lime.” Rolly smiled.

  “With a lime,” repeated Bonnie, motioning the waitress over and ordering.

  “How’s Joan?” Rolly asked.

  “She’s good. We’re good, if that’s what you’re asking. You gotta stop by and see the house sometime. We just finished the kitchen—all new appliances, floors, and fixtures. It’s looking sweet.”

  “You’re going to make a lot of money on that place,” Rolly said. Bonnie and Joan were fixing up a Victorian in Golden Hills, an up and down neighborhood to the east of downtown. But you couldn’t go wrong anywhere in this city buying real estate.

  “Yeah, but we don’t want to sell yet. We want to enjoy it a little. So what are you up to? Still chasing down whiny teenagers for their unhappy mommies?”

  Bonnie’s friendship had survived Rolly’s transition to private detective, but she didn’t think much of his second profession.

  “Yeah, same old stuff—gigging a couple nights a week, picking up a case here and there. Nothing too exciting. Just helping some folks out. Which is how I like it these days.”

  He wanted to broach the subject of Curtis Vox, find out if any rumors might be floating around the station. Cops couldn’t keep quiet if something was hot. He’d bide his time, though. He didn’t want Bonnie thinking he was after anything yet. He’d drop it in naturally, if he could.

  The waitress dropped off his club soda, glanced at Bonnie’s beer which was still three quarters full. Bonnie was a cocktail waitresses’ nightmare. She stayed at her table forever and sipped her drinks slow. She was a cop at the end of her week and she didn’t give a damn what the waitress thought.

  “You still in touch with Leslie?” Bonnie asked. She and Joan had gotten together while Rolly and Leslie were still a couple. They had even double-dated a couple of times.

  “Haven’t talked to her much. She got married a couple of years ago, you know. Lives in La Jolla, nice house in The Farms.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. Have you met the husband?”

  “Yeah. He’s a doctor. Nice enough guy.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “She’s better off with him.”

  “You’re not carrying the torch?”

  “It wouldn’t do me any good if I were. He bought her a nice old house right near the road down to Black’s. She can drop down to the beach anytime she wants.”

  “She’ll want to be careful about dropping down to the beach around there.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Just a joke. Some guy fell off the cliffs the other night.”

  Rolly’s attention picked up. This was the chance to move the conversation into his territory.

  “Some Zonie trying to get down to see the naked bodies?” Zonie was the locals code name for anyone from Arizona, but it could be used to refer to any half-witted tourist from east of the county line.

  “No, it was a local, some kind of computer programmer. He was living up there. Twenty-one years old and he’s got a whole mansion to himself on the cliffs. I’m in the wrong business.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Yeah, like you should talk. Or are you getting rich sometime soon?”

  His Eyebitz.com options popped into his head. Why hadn’t he just returned the key when he first had a chance? It was time to drop Bonnie another bit of information.

  “I might be. I started working for an Internet company last week.”

  “No shit, doing what?”

  “Oh, security stuff, consulting on corporate espionage,” he said, pumping things up just a little. “It’s a company called Eyebitz.com.”

  “Yeah? That’s the place where this guy was working.”

  “Really? What’s his name?”

  “Curtis Vox.”

  “I don’t think I’ve met him. So what did he do, just walk off a cliff?”

  “Nobody’s sure what happened. The cliff might have given way. He had a key to get through the gate down to the beach, so he didn’t need to climb down. It was night. The fog was pretty thick. It seems unlikely he was standing there just to look at the scenery.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, the employees are wound up pretty tight at this place. Maybe he just couldn’t handle the pressure.”

  “The coroner hasn’t ruled out suicide.” Bonnie looked at Rolly. “The thing that bugs me is I was at the guy’s house the night before.”

  “What for?” Rolly said. This was a stroke of luck.

  “A phone call came in, anonymous, said there was a dead body in the pool. I’m working La Jolla night shift last weekend so I got the call. I went up, but I couldn’t find anything. Nobody answered the door. I could see the swimming pool, but no one was in it.”

  “And this guy shows up dead the next day? That sounds suspicious.”

  “Don’t start getting any ideas there, buddy,” Bonnie said. “You let the real detectives handle this one.”

  Bonnie was a good cop. She’d been close to something and had missed it. Rolly knew that it bothered her. He knew that Bonnie couldn’t help feeling she could have done something to prevent Curtis’ death.

  “My lips are sealed,” Rolly said. It was time to change topics. He could sneak back around to it later.

  “Somebody beat up Moogus on Sunday night,” he volunteered.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, outside Patrick’s. Some guy just walked up to him on the street and decked him.”

  “Is he okay? You filed a police report, right?”

  “He got a bloody nose and black eye, but he’s back to being himself. An officer and paramedic came down, checked him out. I’m sure there’s a report somewhere.”

  “Man, that pisses me off.” Bonnie didn’t like Moogus. She thought he was an overbearing, sexist jerk. And Moogus had slept with Joan once, during a time when Bonnie and Joan weren’t getting along. But Bonnie didn’t like anyone getting beat up on her streets, especially someone she knew. She took it personally.

  Rolly drained the last of his soda, sucked the juice out of the lime wedge. “Well, he’ll live, anyway. I gotta get going.” He took out a business card, handed it to Bonnie. “I’d like to see the house sometime. Give me a call.”

&
nbsp; “See you later,” said Bonnie. “I’ll let you know if we find out anything about the guy who hit Moogus.”

  Rolly left the bar and walked back to his car. He might call Bonnie later, tell her more about Eyebitz.com. He might be able to suggest a connection between the mugging of Moogus and her case. She might drop him a little more information on Curtis Vox. Friendships were always worth something.

  He stopped at the taco stand on his way home, picked up some rolled tacos and a carne asada burrito. He should eat better, start buying some food at the grocery store. It would make his mother happy if he lost a little weight. He promised himself he’d start buying groceries next week.

  He walked into the house, dropped the bag with his dinner onto the table, and checked the phone machine. The first message was from Max, inviting him to the Padres game that night. It was enticing, but Rolly wanted to stay home for the evening. He’d call Max tomorrow, pretend he hadn’t picked up the message in time, which wasn’t a complete lie. There was only about a half hour until game time.

  The second message was from Fender.

  “Hey, Rolly,” Fender said. “Ricky wants you to be at our board meeting tomorrow morning. La Jolla Shores Beach parking lot at 7:30. Bring a bathing suit.”

  Board Meeting

  At seven o’clock Tuesday morning Rolly joined the weekday commuters. He crawled north on Interstate 5, stuck in his Volvo wagon, cursing the other drivers around him. The weather was drizzly and gray, imperfect, the kind of photo the Visitors Bureau liked to keep out of travel brochures.

  He had on the only pair of swim trunks he owned, as bright and lime green as the day Leslie purchased them. Leslie believed in the beach, as if it were some kind of all-purpose therapy. Rolly hated the beach, the strange smells in the air, the sweaty, half-naked crowds that littered the sand on hot summer weekends. The swim trunks had gone straight to the bottom drawer of his dresser, stayed there untouched by sunlight or surf.

  The trunks were uncomfortable, tight at the waist, stretched to their limits around his thighs. He’d called Fender twice last night, but got no return call. What kind of board meeting did you have at the beach? He shifted his butt in the driver’s seat, wondered what the hell he was doing.

  He took the Ardath Road exit, about a mile south of Genesee, sat in traffic for what seemed like an hour. He took a right on La Jolla Shores Drive, drove down a few blocks, then left into the beach parking lot. The last time he could remember being at the beach this early in the morning was when he was sleeping one off after a gig in Ocean Beach. He’d walked around all night trying to find the apartment he’d just moved into with Moogus and Bruce, but he’d been too drunk to find his way home. He lay down on the sand against the boardwalk and went to sleep. When he’d woken, arms wrapped around his guitar case, his clothes had been covered in vomit and sand, his head pounding in pain.

  The Shores parking lot was quiet, shrouded in mist. He parked the Volvo, got out. He shivered as he closed the door. A few early striders were taking their morning constitutional along the concrete boardwalk. In the grassy section just to the north of the lot, he saw a group of people huddled together. He headed towards them.

  As he moved closer, he heard someone making a speech. The speaker was Ricky. Twenty or so Eyebitz.com employees stood in a circle around Ricky, like apostles in warm-ups and wetsuits. Surfboards were stacked at the edge of the circle like loaves of bread, wetsuits like rubbery fish. Rolly looked for Fender, then for Alesis, but he didn’t see either one. He stopped a few feet outside of the circle and listened to Ricky’s sermon.

  “We have lost an important piece of our team,” Ricky said. His voice was soft, modulated, suggesting deep seriousness. “We can take this loss, allow it to hurt us, or we can use it to make us stronger.” Ricky paused, caught Rolly’s eye for just a split second.

  “We are all riding a wave," he continued. "And some of us will fall off the wave. Some of us will get back on our boards and some of us won’t. And once in a great while, one of us may drown. That is the chance we take. Every day. The wave is stronger, the ocean bigger than any of us. We can’t fight it. But we can ride it. The key to our thinking, our business, is not to fight the wave, but to become one with it, using its power, anticipating its movement. We surf it together. We use our eyes, our ears, our hands, our feet, and our minds, all working together. If we get cautious, if we lean too far back, we miss the opportunity, we lose the real power of the wave. If we press too hard, we get underneath it. The wave overtakes us, drops down on top of us. It grinds us into the sand.”

  Ricky turned as he talked to the crowd, looking directly into their eyes, addressing each employee personally. They hung on every word, swallowed them down like margaritas on a Saturday night in Tijuana. Ricky might be talking about surfing, but he meant business, religion, and life. Rolly watched Ricky’s face as he spoke, saw the focus, the mania, the evangelical look in his eye.

  “There is no perfect wave,” Ricky continued. “There is only the wave you are riding right now. We’ve caught our wave. Our challenge now is to ride it for as long as we can, to adapt as it changes form and shape. We’ll drop down the face, slide through the curl, and hang on through the chop. We can’t look ahead to the shore. We can’t look back to see if a bigger, better wave is behind us. This one is ours. Don’t fight it. Be one with the wave. We don’t have the power to change it. But we do have the power to stay with the wave, to ride it out wherever it goes. Stay with the wave.”

  Rolly wondered how you could be riding a wave at the same time you were anticipating it, but decided not to worry about it. You weren’t supposed to understand what Ricky said. You were just supposed to go with it. Like the wave.

  Rolly was still half asleep, but the Eyebitz.com employees were ready to go. They had their affirmation now, their consolation, their pep talk. They burst at their seams with that go-get-'em vibe that he’d seen before in timeshare salesmen or EST graduates. Rolly thought about Leslie, about the Reverend Terry Cole Whitaker sessions she’d forced him to attend every Sunday at the old El Cortez Hotel ballroom downtown. Ricky emanated the same kind of vibe.

  “Let's ride,” Ricky crowed. There was a brisk flash of action as the congregation dispersed, picked up their surfboards, and headed out towards the waves. Some of them wore wetsuits with an Eyebitz.com logo inscribed above the left breast.

  “Mr. Waters, welcome. Do you surf?” Ricky said, moving towards Rolly.

  “Not in a long time.”

  “Well, today’s as good a day as any to start again.”

  “Fender told me you wanted to see me?”

  “We’ll talk business out on the water. Put on a wetsuit and grab a board. I would love to re-introduce you to the power of the wave,” he enthused. “I’ll meet you out there.”

  Ricky picked up a surfboard, attacked the beach at a canter, overtaking the trailing members of his flock. Rolly stood alone on the grass, amidst a jumbled pile of discarded clothes, Eyebitz.com branded wetsuits, and surfboards. He sighed, took off his shoes, shirt, and pants, and climbed into one of the wetsuits. He’d been through a lot in his life. He’d seen a lot of weird things. But this was one of the weirdest. He lifted a surfboard and strode out towards the ocean.

  He was ten years old the last time he’d been on a surfboard. It was the day his father had left on a six-month tour of duty off the Vietnam coast. Rolly and his mother drove to the beach at Coronado, a white stretch of sand flanked by the old Hotel Del and the North Island Naval Air Station. They watched his father’s destroyer pass out of the harbor. It sailed past the Point Loma lighthouse and soon disappeared over the horizon.

  There had been a big fight the night before, his mother and father yelling at each other downstairs. The morning after had been full of silences, ending in unsure embraces.

  After the destroyer passed out of sight, Rolly picked up his surfboard and paddled out into the ocean. The wave sets were flat. He bobbed in the water, pulled at a piece of kelp, waited for
something to ride. He saw a small brown lump floating towards him. As it got closer he realized it was a human turd, bobbing on the surface. The ocean was just a big toilet, as contaminated as the rest of his life. His parents were flushing their marriage away and his life along with it. They were toxic and Rolly was too. He sat on the board, watched the turd drift away, then paddled back into shore. It was the last time he’d ever been surfing.

  So here he was twenty-nine years later, still feeling poisonous half the time, shivering with the first cold splash inside his wetsuit. He had to paddle his ass off just to get out past the first line of breakers. A big spray of white water hit his board. He gagged on a mouthful of salty slime. First rule he should have remembered—keep your mouth shut.

  But his persistence paid off. He made it out past the breakers and turned back around, facing halfway to shore. He’d managed to pass a few floundering Eyebitz.com employees on his way out, but it had cost him. He wheezed, trying to recapture oxygen. He was tired and cold. It was hard to understand why people enjoyed this.

  He sat up on the board, tried to maintain his balance, moving his legs wildly in the water around him. The board shifted back and forth under his butt. Ricky waved at him from twenty feet off to the right. He wondered if Ricky was calling him over, but before he could move, Ricky had turned his board towards the beach and caught the next wave coming in. Ricky was a good surfer. He finished his ride, hopped off the board. He turned around and paddled back in Rolly’s direction. Another man joined him, a big man, bulging through his wet suit as if he might burst at the seams. The wetsuit was wrapped so tightly around him that even a few drops of water were unlikely to slip inside of it.