“You wouldn’t object to all the spandex bra-tops and little bike shorts,” Anne noted. “And where do you get off being a fashion cop? That shirt you’re wearing belongs at a cockfight. Anyone wearing a shirt like that would eat eels.”
“Okay, lighten up. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t a told him your monicker. But you shouldn’t get a divorce every time somebody asks you to wash windows.”
“Why’s everybody so pissy?” Fortney asked. “We all passing eggs or what?”
When the Kiwi sailors came in, the saloon exploded. Everyone began cheering, whistling, clapping. There were fifteen of them, several with women companions, and the bar crowd patted each one on the back and shook hands all around. Steinlagers started appearing on the bar as fast as three bartenders could draw them. Sailing-sillies couldn’t buy drinks fast enough for the conquering Kiwis.
But the one Fortney wanted wasn’t among them. He said to Anne, “Damn! I was sure he’d be here. Where the hell is he?”
“Maybe I just should’ve contacted him more formally and gone to their headquarters like I wanted to,” she said.
“I don’t understand it,” Fortney said. “He’s always been…” Then he pointed to the doorway, where, filling it, was the largest human being in the room.
Miles held his hands up over his head, palms clasped, as soon as he recognized acquaintances at the bar, then cruised straight into a group of Kiwi fans who were toasting their heroes with mugs in both hands.
“Which one of us is gonna badge him?” Letch asked.
“I will,” Anne said. “I’m gonna take him outside.”
“One of us should go with you,” Fortney said.
“No, you stay here and watch for the boatyard guy,” Anne said. “I think it’ll be better if I break the news alone.”
Fortney said, “Of course, you’ve considered that you might not be breaking any news?”
“I’ve considered it,” Anne said. “Letch, you stay at the front window and watch us. If I scratch behind my neck, you and Fortney come running with your nines ready.”
“How many rounds we got altogether?” Letch asked. “I think we might need ’em all.”
Letch got up and walked to the window by the entrance, where he could survey the street in front of the restaurant. Fortney stayed at the table, sipping his scotch. Anne jostled her way through the crowd until she got behind the giant Kiwi.
She tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me? Could I talk to you privately for a minute?”
Immediately, a half-dozen sailors started razzing Miles, who looked at Anne with approval. “Sorry, mates,” he said, “my public is calling me.”
Anne walked toward the entrance with Miles behind her, but he touched the sleeve of her blazer and said, “What is it, love? Do we know each other?”
Anne reached into her purse, removed her leather badge holder, and said, “I’m Detective Zorn, San Diego Police Department. I need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
The big man leaned over to examine the badge, then looked her in the eyes, saying, “I should’ve paid that traffic ticket they left on my car. I’m sorry. I can still pay for it, can’t I?”
Anne could see that he wasn’t joking. She said, “I’m not here about a traffic ticket. Follow me outside where it’s quiet. I’ve got a few questions and then you can rejoin your friends.”
The big man followed her obediently down the stairs and out the door, where slow-moving cars were passing back and forth in the America’s Cup commercial basin, stopping to gawk at the compound of Team New Zealand.
Through the window Letch watched Anne say something to the big man. Then he saw the Kiwi raise both hands to the top of his buzz-cut, like it was a white beanie that might blow away.
Letch could see the guy’s mouth going. He was in distress, for sure.
Anne let Miles rave for a while, then she said, “How well did you know Blaze?”
“This is bloody unbelievable!” Miles cried. “I can’t conceive of such a thing. Murdered? Good God!”
“It’s true, believe me,” Anne said. “First of all, what’s your full name?”
“I just cannot conceive of this!” he repeated, dropping his hands to his sides.
Anne took a look at those hands and at his face and neck. There were no scratch marks. No contusions. Nothing.
“Your last name? Miles what?”
“Hargrave,” he said. “Miles Robert Hargrave. But are you sure it was Blaze? The same Blaze who’s been coming here lately?”
“How well did you know her?” Anne asked.
“Hardly at all!” he said. “I can’t believe it. Dead. We’ve had drinks together two or three times, but she drank with many of the lads. You can ask them.”
“I may do that,” Anne said. “But you were with her last night.”
“So were my mates!” Miles said. “They’re upstairs, most of them. You can go ask them.”
“Yes,” Anne said. “But tell me, what happened last night? You drank together, then what? Did you leave with her?”
“No!” he roared. “Absolutely not! Everyone can tell you I stayed and closed the bleedin’ bar!”
“Okay, calm down,” Anne said. “I know you’re upset.”
“Upset? Here I am, a foreigner, not knowing my rights, and I’m being accused of murder!”
“Nobody’s accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to discover what happened to Blaze Duvall from the time you had your last drink with her until she ended up in Mission Bay.”
“Mission Bay?” he said. “When you said she was found in the bay, I thought you meant here. In the big bay.”
“Do you know Mission Bay?”
“A bit. The other New Zealand syndicate had their compound there. And the French, and the Spanish, and the Aussies, for that matter.”
“Did you ever see her outside of this bar?”
“Never!” he said. “I swear.”
“Why did you think she’d been dumped in the big bay?”
“Well, I probably shouldn’t say this—”
“Say it.”
“There was a cock-up last night. You see, I was hoping to…you know, hoping to be with Blaze later. But this little bloke came in. His name’s Simon Cooke. Works for the boatyard we lease our space from. He started a terrible row and had to be ejected. I was one of the ones who did the ejecting.”
“What’s that got to do with Blaze?”
“He was raving something or other at Blaze. They were obviously well acquainted. I’d seen them drinking together. He was jealous, that was plain to see.”
“How do you know his name?”
“He’s the one that taught me how to operate the travel-lift.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of crane that we use to lift our boat in and out of the water. In fact, one of our team members married Simon Cooke’s sister. A nice girl, but I fear for her children with a brother like that.”
“Was Simon Cooke mad at Blaze?”
“He wasn’t pleased, I can tell you. And he was absolutely pissed.”
“By pissed you don’t mean angry?”
“No. By pissed I mean he was drunk. Very drunk. And very belligerent.”
“What happened after you tossed him out of the bar?”
Miles looked up at the entrance, then lowered his voice, saying, “That’s just it! This morning when I asked Gordon—that’s Simon’s brother-in-law—what he did with Simon last night, Gordon said that he refused to be driven home. He went off walking after Gordon took away his car keys.”
“So he was on foot in the vicinity?”
“Yes! And Blaze left just after that. Simon had knocked a pint of beer on her when he started the row and she said she had to go home to change.”
“I guess I’d better have a chat with Simon Cooke,” Anne said.
“Absolutely!” the big Kiwi said. “If you ask me, he’s capable of anything. He seemed insanely jealous about Blaze sitting and drinking with
me.”
Fortney waited impatiently until Letch rejoined him at the table. “Anything wrong?” he asked the vice cop.
“No, Anne’s on her way back up.”
“Where’s the big guy?”
“Took off walking back toward the Kiwi headquarters.”
When Anne rejoined them, she picked up her margarita glass, grimaced, and said, “Letch, order me a scotch, will you?”
“So what happened?” Fortney asked.
“I ruined his evening,” Anne said. “He wanted to go home.”
“And?”
“Unless he’s a very good liar, I think he had a drink with Blaze last night and never saw her again.”
Fortney was bursting. He said, “Damn it, was she a girlfriend of his or what?”
Anne looked at Fortney and said, “Your romantic crush has not been sullied. He said he never did more than drink with her. In fact, you probably saw it every time it happened.”
Fortney was glad even though he knew the two detectives would probably laugh at him behind his back. “So what about the little puke? Find out anything about him?”
“A lot,” Anne said. “His name’s Simon Cooke and he’s definitely worth talking to.”
“All you’ll get is the S.O.D. story,” Letch Boggs said. “Some Other Dude did it. We can question half the town, but it’s gotta come down to Oliver Mantleberry. You may as well face it, Annie. You told Blaze Duvall you’d protect her from that pimp and you couldn’t do it. Just like I told Dawn Coyote and couldn’t do it. All this Cup crap ain’t going nowhere. Well, I’m here to say that all the denial is gonna stop—the minute I get face-to-face with Oliver Mantleberry.”
CHAPTER 14
Normal. He was determined to behave in a normal manner, so he went to the yacht club for dinner.
Business that evening was good. Team New Zealand’s victory had brought out lots of people, all of whom were stunned by the ease with which the Kiwis had won the challenger trials. Ambrose had not consumed solid food for a day and a half and still wasn’t hungry. He knew he had to eat, but first he needed a drink.
Several people in the barroom greeted him and he pretended to be interested in what they had to say. One group was discussing how the Kiwis were demolishing the competition with “only” a budget of $20 million.
Someone else said, “We’ve seemed to lose sight that twenty million dollars is a lot of money for a boat race.”
Nobody paid attention. They were more interested in whether or not Dennis Conner could beat Young America and Mighty Mary and end up as the America’s Cup defender.
The Citizen Cup defender trials still were not decided, mired in America’s Cup politics and confusion. Everyone was complaining about how the three defending syndicates had cozied up to one another and agreed on a “compromise” at a time when Dennis Conner’s boat, Stars and Stripes, was on the brink of elimination. The compromise had allowed all three teams to compete in three-way finals, thus pleasing all their multimillion-dollar sponsors. This compromise allowed Young America two bonus wins it hadn’t earned. Mighty Mary was awarded one bonus win it hadn’t earned. And Dennis Conner, who would have been eliminated, was still alive.
Because nobody in the general public could understand any of it, the defense committee had done its job said the press sardonically, adding that the rational segment of the sailing world believed that any possible drama had degenerated into farce and sponsor stroking.
The more vocal yacht club members openly hoped that the Kiwis would win and take the Cup someplace where greed and ego and politics might not corrupt it. That kind of mutinous and idiotic talk was upsetting to Ambrose Lutterworth and added to his headache. Where could the Cup go and not find corruption?
Finally somebody spoke up loudly, saying that Bill Koch of Mighty Mary and Dennis Conner of Stars and Stripes were about as welcome in the club as secondhand smoke, and that they cared about sailing the way Captain Kidd and Blackbeard had cared about sailing.
The gripes got to Ambrose, who’d had enough about how his club had mishandled America’s Cup XXIX. He entered the dining room and asked for a table in the far corner away from the hubbub. He ordered the harpoon special, chunks of bass and shrimp and scallops on a skewer, and was surprised to discover that food tasted pretty much as it always had. But he could only eat half of it.
As he was finishing his coffee, he heard a member at the next table say to his guests: “Did you hear that a woman was fished out of Mission Bay this morning?”
“Probably swallowed some of the water and died instantly,” said a guest.
The member laughed. “Only thing that can survive in our polluted water is plankton and Dennis Conner. You can’t kill either one, even with arsenic. They just survive.”
Ambrose left his table without signing the check, drove straight home, pulled into his garage, and sat in the car for a few minutes. Then he got out and, for the first time since the horror had begun, opened the trunk of the Cadillac.
Ambrose hauled out the concrete block and put it on the floor of the garage. The satin sash was knotted so tightly that he couldn’t untie it. Using pruning shears, he snipped it free and then just continued snipping, hacking the sash into a dozen pieces, sobbing as he thought of the shamrock-green eyes of Blaze Duvall.
Back in his house, he realized that he had stopped feeling suicidal and tried to focus on what he’d heard at the dinner table. Maybe Dennis Conner would win the defender trials after all. And if he did so, maybe he’d find a way to beat the Kiwis next month and keep the Cup in San Diego. After all, he was like plankton. You couldn’t kill him with arsenic.
—
Tamara Taylor was trying to get the ironing done while the baby was yelling his head off. The two older ones were fighting over the TV and she hadn’t even started supper and wouldn’t you know it? Somebody was at the door, yelling, “Tamara! Tamara! You there, girl?”
It was her neighbor, Velma. Tamara put the iron on the kitchen counter and went to the door, using a dishtowel to wipe the sweat from her face.
“Come in, Velma,” Tamara said. “Jist step over these kids. They ain’t gonna stop fussin’ nohow.”
“You got a phone call.”
“A phone call? At your house?”
“Yeah, it’s Oliver. He said he gotta talk to you, but not on your phone. You better come over and talk to him.”
“I don’t never wanna talk to that man again!” Tamara said.
“You better talk to him,” Velma said. “I’ll stay with the kids.”
Tamara heaved a big sigh and shook her head, then trudged next door to a little clapboard house very much like hers. The only difference was that Velma’s kids were older and had gone off somewhere. It was nice and quiet.
She picked up the phone.
“It’s me,” Oliver Mantleberry said.
“I know it’s you,” Tamara said. “Whadda you want?”
“Whadda I want? Gud-damn, woman! I’m your husband and the father a your children and you ask me whadda I want?”
“I ain’t never noticed no marriage license,” Tamara reminded him.
“One thing I want is, I wanna know if what I heard was true.”
“What’s that?”
“I heard that there was some white men in suits standing in the front yard on Easter Sunday.”
“That’s right.”
“Who were they?”
“They wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And I don’t appreciate you bringin’ your po-lice business to my house on Easter Sunday.”
“I didn’t bring ‘em!”
“They say different.”
“What did they want?”
“I think you know.”
“Was it about Dawn?”
“Yeah. And it was in the papers and TV, too. Somebody stuck her. They say it was you.”
“That’s a damn lie!”
“It ain’t nothin’ to me one way
or the other who sticks some white-trash whore. But nobody is bringin’ the law to my home on Easter Sunday, you hear me?”
“I need for you to bring me some things. I can’t come home till this blows over.”
“Bring you what?”
“I need some clothes. And I need some money.”
“Where am I gonna get money?”
“Harold. Go see Harold. He owes me five hundred.”
“I’m all through collectin’ your money,” Tamara Taylor said. “I’m through with pimps, period. I ain’t bringin’ nothin’. You got your own self in this, you get your own self out.”
“You do what I say, woman!”
“Fuck you.”
“You could end up like Dawn Coyote, you bitch!”
“Yeah? I wonder how you gonna sneak up on me, past the two dogs I’m gonna git tomorrow. And the thirty-eight-caliber pistol that Velma said I can have anytime I want it. And the new locks on my doors that I already got.”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “Listen to me. When this blows over, you’re gonna need me to help with the kids. I’m gonna make me big money and you’ll get some. Now you do what I tell you, okay?”
“No, you listen,” Tamara said. “If I was you, I’d get my black ass outta town right now. Because they got a piece a very incriminatin’ evidence against you.”
“I knew it!” he said. “That bitch! Dawn’s friend, name a Blaze Duvall. She told ’em I did it, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about no Blaze,” Tamara said. “They didn’t discuss their case with me. But I saw them find a piece a evidence that you was stupid enough to leave behind.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“A washrag.”
“Washrag? What washrag?”
“The one you used when you came home that mornin’. The one you dropped in the bathtub and the cops found. That’s what washrag.”
She could almost hear him thinking over the phone. Very quiet. Trying to remember. Then, “What about the washrag?”
“It had blood on it. Did you cut yourself shavin’?”
“No.”
“Was it your blood?”
Floaters Page 24
