Black's Beach Shuffle: A Rolly Waters Mystery

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  As Rolly sat on the board waiting for Ricky, he kept shifting his feet, still working to maintain his tenuous balance. He finally managed to spread both legs way out on either side of the board and find a semi-comfortable equilibrium.

  “You made it,” Ricky said, as he pulled up on Rolly’s right.

  Rolly looked out to sea, felt relieved there were no promising waves on the horizon, turned back to Ricky.

  “Fender said something about a board meeting?”

  “This is it,” Ricky said, tapping lightly with his fingers on the board between his legs. “Surfboards. Every Wednesday for any employee who wants to come out. It’s a little teambuilding exercise I put together. On my orders, the company bought two-dozen boards, wetsuits, and a trailer to carry them in. Walter here is responsible for taking care of them.”

  He indicated the larger man, who had taken a spot about six feet off Rolly’s left. It was the same man who’d been practicing yoga in his office, the one who played the harmonica. Up close he had a vague, empty look in his eyes. He rested a pair of massive knuckles on the board under him, turning them over ever so slightly like a silverback gorilla.

  “Mr. Waters, is there any reason you might be unhappy with our business arrangement?” asked Ricky. Walter grunted low under his breath. He appeared to be smirking, if it was possible for an ape in a wetsuit to smirk.

  Rolly waited a moment, as if he were thinking, which he was, but not about his business arrangement with Ricky. He recalled the recent arrangement of Moogus’ face and wondered if Walter worked in the face arrangement business when he wasn’t hauling surfboards or holding the lotus position.

  “No,” he said. “I’m perfectly happy with our arrangement. Why do you ask?”

  “I haven’t had any communication from you. Did you contact Curtis? Have you had any conversation with him?”

  “Curtis Vox is dead.”

  “I’m aware of Curtis’ death, Mr. Waters. I have discussed it with my employees, news reporters, and police detectives. I have not slept for the last thirty-six hours because Curtis Vox is dead. My question for you is did you have any contact with him before he died?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “You were aware that it was he who originally reported the Magic Key missing? We did discuss this in our meeting on Sunday, did we not?”

  “Yes,” Rolly said.

  “Then I’m curious as to why you did not contact Curtis. It seems to me that would have been the place to start.”

  “I was unable to contact him,” Rolly said. “I went to the house. I tried calling him too.”

  He was telling little lies. They didn’t matter. Curtis was dead before Rolly had even been hired. Someone had placed the Magic Key in Rolly’s guitar case at the party, the night before his visit to Eyebitz.com headquarters. Had Curtis put it in there? Did anyone else know about it? Did Ricky?

  “Mr. Waters, I sincerely believe that some of the smartest, hardest-working people in the world work for me here at Eyebitz.com. They expect to be well rewarded for their talent and efforts,” Ricky said. He spread his arms out expansively as if to claim the group of people bobbing on the waves in front of him. He was king of his people, the big Hawaiian. His subjects ran naked and free in the sun. They were building a shiny new money machine for him, paving the way to riches and fame.

  “Yes, I’m sure they do,” Rolly said. He looked at the surfers, watched as the smartest, hardest-working, soon-to-be well rewarded employees of Eyebitz.com tried to stand up on their boards, lost their balance, tumbled into the water in various ungraceful ways.

  “You will be well rewarded, also, Mr. Waters, if you find and return the Magic Key. I think we’ve made that quite clear.”

  “Yes,” Rolly said. His surfboard drifted towards Walter’s. The big ape was silent, gazing towards shore.

  “I expect a lot from the people who work for me, including you.”

  “I understand,” Rolly said. His outstretched left foot had drifted within inches of Walter’s surfboard. He pulled it back underneath his own board, which was a mistake. The surfboard tipped to the left.

  He fell into the water. It was cold and nasty, a briny wet in his nostrils. His wetsuit provided buoyancy, though, and he floated back towards the surface. But his head bumped against something solid, preventing him from breaking through. His path was blocked. He panicked, started thrashing his arms. A muscular leg was in front of him, the flat underside of a surfboard against his head. A large hand reached down, made its way towards him like a five-legged octopus. He turned his face, trying to get away from the hand. It grabbed the back of his neck, held tight for a couple of seconds, then pulled him back to the surface.

  Rolly gasped for air, looked into the eyes of Little Walter, who lifted him up like a wet kitten.

  “Be careful,” Walter said, releasing his grip. “The ocean is beautiful, but it is treacherous.” His voice was high-pitched, raspy, as if halfway through puberty it had stuck in his throat.

  Rolly said nothing. He turned away and remounted his surfboard.

  “I’m glad we had this talk, Mr. Waters,” Ricky continued as if nothing had happened. He turned his head, looked back at the ocean.

  “Here comes a good set,” Ricky said as he flattened himself on his board and paddled away hard. Walter did the same, heading off in the other direction. Ricky looked back at Rolly and pointed.

  “Start digging, Mr. Waters! The next wave’s for you.”

  Rolly pressed himself down on his board, pointed towards shore and began stroking the water. He had to get back into the beach somehow. This way was as good as any.

  The Seawall

  Rolly floated into the shallows, hopped off his surfboard, stood up. He wiggled his toes in the sand. It was good to be back on solid land, away from the nervous feeling he got sitting out on the water with only an unbalanced piece of resin and foam between himself and the ocean below.

  As he walked across the sand towards the boardwalk, he heard a loud, angry voice. Ricky stood on the beach by the seawall, holding a cell phone up to his ear. Fender stood next to him, on the other side of the wall, dressed in a homely brown suit. He looked as uncomfortable as Rolly had been out on the water.

  “Listen, my friend,” Ricky screamed into the phone. His left hand pressed against his temple, as if to keep his head from exploding. “Listen, my friend, if I don’t have those numbers on my desk by noon, heads will roll. I want to review it today. Believe me, if I don’t have signoff on this today, heads will roll. Heads will roll.”

  Ricky snapped the phone shut, pointed towards Fender He lowered his voice, stabbed Fender several times in the chest with his finger. Rolly couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  A ringing tone played off to Rolly’s right, someone’s cell phone or a pager. It was playing the intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” Another ring went off to his left. “Fur Elise” was the tune of choice this time. Two more phones started ringing farther away. Eyebitz.com employees began scrambling, ran in from the waves or sat up on the sand. They opened their towels, dug in discarded trousers and shoes, pulled out cell phones and punched at the buttons. The wrath of Ricky buzzed and beeped its way through the invisible network of wireless nodes. Rolly could almost trace the path of accountability and blame from cell phone to cell phone, beach towel to beach towel.

  Ricky left Fender and headed back to the parking lot, flipping his phone open again as it started ringing. Rolly walked over towards Fender, sat down on the wall.

  “What’s that all about?” Rolly asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” Fender replied. “Just some stuff Ricky wanted. He’s got a presentation on Friday for a group of investment bankers.”

  “Seems to have caused quite a commotion.”

  “Ricky gets people going.”

  “Puts the fear of God in them?”

  “I guess so,” Fender said. “It’s worth it, though. Look at what happened to Yahoo!, to eBay, Amazon. All of the people that started those
companies are going to be millionaires.”

  “Hmm,” Rolly nodded. The beach was almost deserted now. People rushed back to their cars, dumping their wetsuits and surfboards in a pile on the grass, still frantically talking on phones as they climbed into BMWs, Jeeps, and Miatas, and screeched out of the parking lot.

  “How long do people have to put up with Ricky before they get rich?”

  “The IPO is next month. We’ve got some cheap, locked-in shares we can sell the first day if it goes well. The real money will come in if we stick around for another year or two.”

  “I guess that keeps people pretty nervous about getting fired?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So nobody’s rich yet?”

  “No, except maybe for Ricky and King. They’re rich from before. They’ll just be richer.”

  “Yeah, I read about Ricky’s last business. What does this King Gibson guy do?”

  “He’s like an investor. He advises Ricky on financial stuff. He’s providing the money that helps keep us going until we go public.”

  “He expects to get his money back, I assume?”

  “He expects to get it back ten or twenty times over. He’s what’s called a ‘phase-one investor.’ He doesn’t have to wait for a year before he cashes in all his shares.”

  Rolly paused. It sounded like King Gibson had a pretty good deal.

  “What about Curtis?”

  “Curtis was going to make a lot of money too.”

  “He wasn’t rich already?”

  “No.”

  “So how could he afford to live in that house?”

  “Oh, King set that up.”

  “King owns the house?”

  “He knows somebody that does. He’s got connections.”

  “I guess King just wanted to show his appreciation to Curtis, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Fender said. He put his hand to his forehead, smoothed out his brows. “That was part of it.”

  “What was the other part?”

  Fender rubbed his chest where Ricky had poked with his finger.

  “Rolly,” he said, “you can’t tell anyone else about this, okay?”

  “Sure,” Rolly said.

  “Curtis was kind of weird, you know, different.”

  “Different, how so?”

  “Well, he was kind of free in his attitude, his lifestyle. It bothered some of the other people at the office.”

  “Free, how?”

  “Well, um…” Fender looked down at his shoes. “He liked to work in the nude. He said it helped him think clearly when he was coding.”

  “Coding?”

  “You know, programming the computers.”

  “I guess I’d call that a little weird.”

  “He usually worked late at night, so it wasn’t a problem. There weren’t that many people around. He had this robe he’d throw on if someone knocked on the door. But at some point he didn’t care anymore. He’d walk down the halls or show up at meetings without his clothes on. People complained.”

  “So Mr. Gibson politely offered to put him up at the house?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard, at least.”

  Rolly considered the information Fender had given him. It was one more layer of weirdness, but it did make a kind of sense.

  Someone started playing a harmonica. Rolly glanced around for the source. Walter sat on the sand about fifty feet away, his back propped up against the seawall. He was the one playing the harp.

  “What about Walter, there?” Rolly said, nodding his head in Walter’s direction.

  “Little Walter?”

  “Little Walter? That’s his name? Like the Little Walter?”

  “I dunno. Who’s that?”

  “Great Chicago blues harp player. A lot better than this guy.”

  “Well, that’s just his nickname. I don’t know where the name comes from. That’s what Curtis called him.”

  “I guess it’s supposed to be some kind of joke because he’s so big. What does Walter do?”

  “He’s director of maintenance.”

  “Maintenance of what?”

  “Oh, the building, security, maybe. I don’t really know. King brought him in.”

  Rolly listened as Walter tortured the harp. Rolly wanted to walk over, look Walter straight in the eye, and tell him his harmonica playing sucked. He wanted to act like the drunks that hid in the corners of the nightclubs he played, timing their half-shouted insults for maximum impact. He wanted to stuff the harmonica down Walter’s throat.

  But he didn’t. It was time to do a little research. It was time to leave the beach and start hitting the stacks.

  The Library

  The public library downtown was a utilitarian block of rectangular concrete, built in the 1960s. It rejected all sunlight from its three-story, tan exterior walls. The insides were frayed at the edges, with busted toilets, fallen ceiling tiles, and dry, musty stacks, attended by brave, listless librarians marking time nobly while waiting for the day when city leaders might find the courage to spend money again.

  It was a tired old shrine to the public good. Rolly loved it. It looked like he felt, unkempt and underappreciated, but deep inside it, if you worked hard enough, you could find knowledge and wisdom. Rolly had spent three years of his life here, and down at City Hall, doing research for Max and his lawsuits. It was because of the time he’d spent here that he’d been able to qualify for his investigator’s license. You had to have three thousand hours in the state of California. It had all happened because of the accident. The job Max had given him to keep him out of jail had turned into months and then into years, three thousand hours of poring through ownership deeds and microfilm and phone books, looking for names and addresses and dates. When Max retired, Rolly couldn’t imagine working for anyone else. He decided to get a license, start his own business.

  Before going to the library, Rolly stopped by City Hall, the Office of Records, looked up the ownership deeds for 1186 Starlight Drive—the address listed on the crumpled photocopy of the party invitation he carried in his pocket. Two owners were listed. The most recent, G. Tesch, had bought the house in 1985. The man he bought the house from was Anthony Kaydell, as in Kaydell Computer, the company Professor Ibanez regretted investing in.

  Which was why Rolly was now at the library, reading through old newspaper stories on Kaydell Computer, tracing the path of its notorious founder through the tiny news lines burned into microfilm.

  Kaydell promised to create computers for the masses, underselling the competition by almost 50 percent. He did it by underselling his own costs by at least 30 percent. The company lost two hundred dollars every time it sold a computer. But no one knew that. Investors bought into the vision. The money piled up. Kaydell joined the social set, made friends in the city council, donated thousands to the mayor’s re-election campaign. He supported the arts and financed an alcohol-free rock 'n' roll club for teenagers. Everyone felt fortunate to have a man of such vision and talent making himself part of the city’s bright future.

  Then Kaydell bought a sailboat, made an announcement. He was selling his house in The Farms and sailing solo around the world. He planned to return with a new vision for the next great paradigm in the computer business, along with a plan to make it all happen. His boat was found at sea three days after he left, abandoned and empty. His body was never recovered. Mexican pirates were blamed.

  Soon thereafter the Kaydell Company unraveled. Before leaving on his voyage, Kaydell had apparently raided the company coffers, transferring large sums of money to an offshore account. There was nowhere to go for a company that was losing money on every computer it sold. There never had been. Investors sued, but there weren’t any assets to claim. There weren’t any Mexican pirates either, just an ingenious con man who’d made an exquisite exit.

  There was a photo of Kaydell. He had a large, fuzzy mustache and shag haircut, which, even at the time, had been out of date. Rolly wondered if all con men were fashion impaired. All the on
es he’d encountered were behind the times in their choices of clothing and hair. Perhaps it helped in the con, made the marks feel slightly superior, luring them into believing the con man was an eccentric genius who couldn’t be bothered with the latest styles.

  Rolly printed the page with the picture. He folded it up and slipped it into the back pocket of his pants. He left the library, walked to his car, and drove home.

  When he walked into the house, there was a message on his phone machine.

  “Mr. Waters, this is King Gibson. I have some things I wish to discuss with you, information I think you might find useful. I’m at the Hyatt Aventine in La Jolla. Please join me for dinner at six.”

  There was a game being played at the management level of Eyebitz.com, first Ricky and now King wanting to talk to him. But who was playing what against whom? He hadn’t prepared well for Ricky this morning. If King had a game plan, then Rolly needed one too. He looked at his watch. It was 4:30. He had an hour before he needed to leave.

  He stripped off his clothes, took a quick shower, put on decent clothes, something acceptable for dinner at the Hyatt with a rich businessman. He took out a notepad and pencil and placed them on the living room table. He picked up a guitar, the sunburst Telecaster. He played for a while, pausing to write down a few notes as he went, things he might want to ask Mr. King Gibson. He started singing a song he’d written soon after he’d begun playing again, after he’d bumped his practice time up to an hour a day.

  I’m drifting higher and higher above

  the clouds.

  I may never come down.

  Maybe it’s too late

  Maybe it’s too late

  Maybe it’s too late to save myself.

  The Hyatt

  “What kind of jackass calls himself King?” Rolly said to himself as he drove north on I-5 again. He passed Mission Bay on his left, the manmade dredge-work of water and sandy islands created for Conrad Hilton and his hotel back in the fifties. It was best known now for its annual over-the-line tournament, a softball mutation played by sunburned fat men dedicated to beer, sun worship, and the deification of women with extra-large mammary glands.