Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3)

by Thomas Hollyday

  “How’d you boys get out here?” asked Harry.

  “Our boat’s on the other side,” Chuckie said. “We come in from the Bay side.” He pointed to an inlet going off to the left behind the police boat.

  “We had to tell him cause Chuckie couldn’t figure out how to come through the marsh,” said Steve.

  WeeJay nodded.

  Steve added, “We figured weren’t much more than sunnies in here, but we tried anyway. Sunfish ain’t no good to catch. No fight. Almost as bad as dowdies ‘cause they just hang on your line.”

  WeeJay said, “I looked down into the water. That’s when I seen the boat, at least the shape of it, down maybe twenty feet.”

  “How could you see through the muddy water?” asked Harry.

  “It was clear. Just clear in that one spot,” said WeeJay.

  “Tell me what it looked like,” said Harry.

  “Just all them pipes, like big silver snakes curving under the water,” said WeeJay.

  “Pipes?” asked Harry.

  “Yeah. The exhausts sticking up. Ain’t you ever seen racing boats?” WeeJay answered, his tone showing surprise at Harry’s ignorance.

  “Like in the big regatta next week?” asked Harry. He and his managing editor had been reporting and photographing the boat racing teams and their trucks coming into town.

  Chuckie nodded and said “This was a racing boat all right. We all looked down at it from the shoreline. It weren’t no regular sunk boat.”

  Steve said, “That’s how we suspected it was Walker John’s boat, cause we know he took his racer when he ran away.”

  “How did you get word to the sheriff?” asked Harry.

  “My daddy’s boat radio,” said Chuckie, proudly.

  “You make sure to write that Walker never got a chance to race his boat,” added WeeJay.

  “What do you mean?” asked Harry.

  “I think you kids have done enough talking to the reporter,” said the toothless State Policeman. He looked down at Harry and said, talking fast and loud, “You too, folks. We don’t want no trouble so let’s get your boat turned around and out of here.”

  The woman grinned at Harry. When she had run the craft back into the marsh a few hundred feet and out of sight of the police boat, she said. “Ain’t no white cop telling me what I can see and what I can’t.”

  Then, after what seemed like an interminable number of turns and twists, the boat slowed again. Harry looked ahead of the bow, trying to spot something besides green reeds and water.

  The reeds began to thin out. Ahead, voices were shouting. The engine, very close to them, started again with a roar and pounded at his ears. It drowned out the sound of their own boat. The foliage opened to show him an island, bright in the sunlight, a few hundred feet ahead over a patch of open water. The island was larger than the others and with a beach of dark sand. The woman stopped the boat where it could be hidden behind high grass. The two of them could observe what was happening but not be seen.

  To Harry’s right, a mud covered metal barge carried the crane, a large yellow but rusty machine on tracks, of the kind used for dredging river silt to deepen local shipping channels. Behind the barge he could see a slight rise in the land, more pronounced than with other mud islands. On this rise, tall pines, their branches filled with rows of waiting black buzzards, were silhouetted against the sky.

  Several men stood on the deck of the barge watching cables coming from the crane sprocket and extending beneath the water’s surface. One of them Harry recognized as Sheriff Good, whose nickname was Cheeks, but not to his face. The sheriff was a big man, not overly heavy, but with an overhanging belly and large jowls that made his eyes appear small like those of a pig. His belly, his face or his large backside which filled up any chair he tried to sit in, were probably causes for his nickname. Either way his body appeared slovenly and even with his tailored confederate gray police uniform, he could not improve on his appearance. In Harry’s brief experience in River Sunday he’d heard the sheriff compared to a hog but at the same time with the footnote that hogs were clever and the woods around River Sunday held a full share of wild hogs known for their tempers and absolute courage. The large bore revolver holstered at his waist finished the sheriff’s appearance. The sheriff was giving orders to the crane operator, a man in overalls with thinning hair slicked with oil, slender but with oversize arm muscles who manipulated the crane levers, from the machine’s cabin.

  The woman idled the boat. Harry saw her mouth move, but he couldn’t hear her against the diesel noise. Harry again felt the incessant heat envelope his body as he readied his camera. Then suddenly the diesel slowed down and in the relative quiet, he could finally hear the woman.

  “Watch yourself,” she said. He nodded that he had heard. To steady himself he grabbed the boat rails with one hand while studying the scene through his camera telephoto lens.

  “It’s deep in here. Fall in and the quicksand, it’ll fool you,” she warned. Then, she nosed the boat carefully on a mud island and, as the craft stopped moving, she sat down to watch.

  “Cheeks,” she said pointing to the sheriff. She spit and said, “Giving orders to my husband as usual.”

  Her husband was also standing near the sheriff. He was a short man in a green park ranger uniform and brimmed hat and was holding a line that led into the water beside the cables. Two other men in swimsuits, Harry suspected they were State Police divers, were in the water, their arms stretched upward and holding on to the side of the barge.

  A diver cleared the surface, his black and silver gear glinting in the sunlight as he motioned to the sheriff. The sheriff signaled the operator and the engine slowed again.

  The diver disappeared underwater. When he surfaced a second time, he waved to the sheriff. The crane started up again with a lot of noise. The crane gears screamed against the hoist winch.

  Harry snapped photos, his camera whirring. Parts of an encrusted boat began to appear. First the exhaust pipes which were bent outward and up from the mid mounted engine came to the surface. After a few moments the deck appeared and the form of an eighteen foot runabout appeared, water rushing off its surface. What was left of a driver’s seat was still in front of a large engine mounted without cover on the deck. The hull finally cleared and Harry saw the propeller strut and rudder. All seemed intact, as if the boat had peacefully sunk into the depths keeping right side up. Draped over it, however, was a shroud of seaweed.

  Water continued to rush out of the hull as it hung on the cables from the crane. It was a dismal sight. Years of weed and mud were hardened on what appeared to have been a white hull, the muck coating it a dirty brown and yellow. The engine had only a few parts where chrome still showed through the corrosion.

  The sheriff gave the signal to swing the crane around and slowly the boat moved to center on the barge deck. The Ranger and the other helpers worked quickly on the slippery deck to guide the hulk into hull chocks. Then, with lines, they secured it to steel cleats on the barge deck. When all was completed, the sheriff stepped up on the chocks to inspect the craft. With him watching, the officers and the Ranger dug around in the hull, lifting handfuls of mud and weed from inside near the driver’s seat and placing the refuse carefully into buckets. After a few minutes, the short haired police diver looked up at the sheriff.

  “No corpse, no bones, in here, Sheriff. Walker John sure as hell didn’t go down with his boat,” said the diver, in a matter of fact way.

  The sheriff looked at the policeman and replied, his voice like a steady grumble, “So he run it in here and left it, you think?”

  “Most likely,” the man replied, scraping mud from his fingers.

  “They searched pretty good back then and he weren’t in here,” said the sheriff.

  “I know, Sheriff. He’s long gone, I’m afraid,” said the diver, climbing down from the wreck.

  Harry turned to the woman and whispered, “This Walker John, how can he be sure it belonged to him?”


  The woman smiled. “The boat name, Mr. Jacobsen. Look at the side of the hull.”

  Harry looked. The once black letters spelling the two words, Black Duck, were faintly visible. He set the exposure for high contrast and snapped another set of photos.

  “Black Duck was the name he used,” she said. Her eyes were full of pride, as though she were talking about a national celebrity. “Unfortunately, Cheeks found it,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Harry asked.

  “Always been too many questions about Walker John, about them murders he supposed to commit,” she said and paused, as if she had said too much, then she continued, “Walker’s dead, that’s all, and Cheeks ought to let him be.”

  Harry heard the sheriff giving orders to the barge captain. The voice was loud and rumbling with authority.

  “We’ll take this barge and her cargo back around to River Sunday. I got a place for this wreck.” The big man brought out his cell to make a call, but before he did, he added, “We got us the interesting problem, boys.”

  “Looks like you do, Sheriff,” the diver said, lifting his air tank from the deck.

  “Well, don’t you know, this case has been closed for thirty years, since the fire,” said the sheriff, looking out at the knotted mass of vines and trees of the swamp, “We all figured he was drowned.”

  “Maybe you want to give up on finding Walker’s body, Sheriff. It’s been a long time,” said the diver.

  Harry could see a glare in the eyes of the sheriff, as the big man looked at his fellow policemen. The eyes were small and buried in the fat of the sheriff’s face but even at the distance Harry thought he saw a burning light in those eyes as of intense feeling lurking there, perhaps of hatred, but at any rate the look of a hunter estimating his prey, as the sheriff stared at the swamp growth. Then the big engine on the barge cut in with its noise and its powerful propeller began to churn the water. Harry could hear no more conversation as he watched the craft move slowly out of the marsh toward the open water of the nearby Chesapeake Bay.

  Chapter 2

  Wednesday July 29, 7:30 PM

  Harry drove from the Wilderness to the condominium of his managing editor, Annie Till, to drop off his film. As he parked, he was still thinking about what WeeJay had said, that the criminal Walker John had not been allowed to race his boat. He was puzzled about the respect a killer was getting from a child and wanted to find out more about the boy’s references to murders and fires.

  The condo was inexpensive but new, a townhouse model painted white like the others, in the expanded section of a development on the outskirts of River Sunday. Many of the residents worked as unskilled labor in factories in the nearby industrial park, while others, white and black retirees, had sold their houses in town and moved to these smaller and cheaper places.

  Annie answered the door. She looked up and down his outfit with surprise. He followed her glance and realized that he was covered with mud from the swamp.

  “You look like hell, Harry,” she said, as she opened the screen door to let him come in. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  She was younger than Harry, he forty, she in her late twenties, dressed in running shorts and exercise halter top. She pushed up her brown hair which had been loose around her shoulders and held a towel to her forehead. Through her sweat, he could smell her perfume, the fragrance of magnolia with a touch of honeysuckle blossoms. Annie was average height like Harry and had a large oval face, not beautiful but healthy, with intense dark eyes that helped her be a good reporter, the kind of eyes that Harry had told her could stare down a story out of a head of cabbage.

  He felt as tired as he knew he must look. All he could do was hold up the rolls of exposed film from his camera and say, “Some shots for the paper about a boat that belonged to Walker John Douglas.”

  She took the film and stepped back to let him pass into the air-conditioning of her living room. “Walker John,” she said slowly. “A black man who killed two white women. What are you doing, dragging us into an old story like that?” She had grown up in Maryland, although on the other side of the Bay, and talked with the Chesapeake drawl he still had trouble understanding.

  He nodded. ”I just went out to look at his boat. Some kids found it out in the Wilderness. Tell me about him.”

  “Funny,” she said, turning off the television. “I came across his name when I was doing research for the regatta champions,” she said. “Douglas received a special award from the national race boat association in 1968.”

  Harry wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  She laughed. “You survived the bugs.”

  He pointed to the film. “We might be able to use these photos for this Saturday’s issue,” he said with a wink. “Spice up the front page.”

  “So our little town is finally able to give you a story that you like. Wow. I haven’t seen this side of the silent Harry Jacobsen. I like it,” She stood looking at him as he fell back on a wooden chair. “You’re sure it’s his boat, Harry?”

  “Name on the boat the same,” Harry said, wiping the sweat from his forehead and pushing back his loose hair. “I watched Sheriff Good haul the boat out. He’s all excited,” he said, his eyes closed, feeling the air conditioning on his skin.

  She calculated with her lips, then said, “If Walker John is still alive, he’d be in his seventies now.”

  “Cheeks must know that,” Harry said.

  “Black man, white sheriff,” she said, padding barefoot into her kitchen. He could hear her rummaging for a glass. ”I’m sure the story is going to have racial overtones. Hell, Walker burned down half the town, you know.”

  “We should write the story looking into Walker’s motive,” said Harry, feeling a little better. “That’s the main thing. Why would the guy burn down the town?”

  She laughed and said, with her light sarcasm that he was used to, “Come on, Harry. I can’t imagine what motive a black guy in a white town would have.” She handed him a glass of iced water and he took a long drink. He smelled her light perfume along with her own sweat left over from her evening jogging.

  “From what I hear,” she said, “Cheeks has always had this thing about the Walker Douglas case, like he’s got to solve it, or something.”

  Harry said, “What do you mean?”

  She said, “People say that he gets angry whenever the case is mentioned.”

  “He probably knew the persons who died in the fire,” said Harry.

  She said. “I think it was more of a lawman thing, like he wanted the case finished, brought to court, the perp locked away in jail, and so forth. Next time you go in his office look over on the left. He keeps all the old evidence about Walker John spread out on a table.”

  She continued on, her manner serious and matter of fact, like she was framing a story in her mind. “If we print these pictures, we’ll start up a hornet’s nest of opinions. People are funny about discussing that period of time. Lots of things happened, I guess, to make people feel ashamed.“

  Harry had long realized that the town had its divisions. Two specific and strong religious groups existed, one made up mostly of members of the black Baptist church, which tended to be more open to social change and so-called national liberal issues, and one from a fundamentalist church with white members on the main street of town. The latter tended toward old fashioned Christian and conservative values. From time to time the group leaders, Pastor Allingham for the people of color, and Reverend Blue for the white fundamentalists, would speak out on town issues. People not in either church, i.e., probably half the residents of River Sunday, were middle of the road, uncommitted citizens, interested in their own affairs and in making enough money to take care of their families and to live well.

  “What kind of things happened? Is there some kind of great secret that the town is hiding?” asked Harry, exasperated as well as hot and tired from the swamp. “You think just publishing the pictures of the boat will stir up controversy? You think that kind of ra
cial hatred still exists here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I just got a feeling, a hunch, always have had one about those days around here. Something went wrong back then and it’s hard to pin down because nobody talks about it. If it were me as editor, I just wouldn’t print them, wouldn’t rock the boat.”

  “Did Lloyd ever say anything?” Lloyd had been the former editor’s name. Harry had bought the paper from his estate and Annie was working for Lloyd at the time.

  “That’d be the day,” she laughed. “He was so scared of the people who ran the town that he never wrote anything bad about anyone.”

  Harry moved toward the doorway, a little discouraged with her reaction. “I’m going back to the office,” he said, remembering that the barge carrying the wreck should arrive at the harbor soon. He put his hand on the doorway frame and said, “How are you doing on the regatta front page?”

  “I get the final schedule of heats and boat classes from the committee tomorrow, “she answered. “I still say a Walker story is not going to help our circulation. Some people may cancel their ads, Harry.”

  Harry didn’t reply.

  “We’re asking for trouble,” Annie said. “To some of the folks in this town civil rights means the same thing as Civil War.”

  She smiled and said, “Harry,” as she looked at him like a schoolteacher, a very patient one.

  He said, “I ‘m not going to run away from this story, Annie. I’ll check in Lloyd’s files for background,” said Harry.

  She said slowly, her smile fading,” Look, you get to call it because you’re the owner.” Then she recovered her sense of humor and grinned, “Anyway, watch out for the big spiders in that storage room.”

  She had begun to wipe her face with her towel again. Harry noticed that around her tanned neck was the small cross she always wore. It flopped outside her tee-shirt and rested in the valley between her breasts. Harry hadn’t had any religious feelings since witnessing the carnage in Africa. He laughed to himself at the irony when she asked him to come to the Catholic church with her and then told him that the chapel was the only Christian meeting place in River Sunday that had never had a building inside the original town square.