The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer

by Rick Boyer

  Maybe because it was near his home, or on his way home. And I thought if I just hung around the neighborhood long enough, something might suggest itself. I sauntered down to Isaacson's, looking casually in the window but not going in. I noticed a nice Martin D-18 guitar in the window, and wondered how much they wanted for it. Probably a grand. I looked around. On the next street over were a whole raft of antique and curio shops. Some sold junk, but others sold things like mounted elephant tusks, Ming porcelains, ship's figureheads, and other neat things. It reminded me of Charles Street in Boston, or Royal Street in New Orleans. Isaacson's street was a notch or two lower, though definitely respectable. There were also two small grocery stores, the kind that stock imported beers and fancy foodstuffs.

  A block up was Water Street, the main drag of the historic part of town, just as Woods Hole's Water Street was. A block away in the other direction was the waterfront. I ambled down there and surveyed the fish piers, seafood packing houses, fish brokerage offices, and marine supply houses. All the elements of Gloucester Harbor, its sister city to the north, were there, except that the harbor was huge and spread out, as opposed to the forest of masts and spars, hawsers and packed hulls of the crowded confines of Gloucester's inner harbor.

  As I walked along the asphalt and cyclone fences bordering the piers and factories, sunburned men with red faces, wearing wool and flannel Jackets, hooded sweatshirts, corduroy pants, and waterproof boots passed me, smoking, cussing, and laughing. The clothes were the tip-off that these were fishermen. Nobody goes about dressed for fall in midsummer. Nobody but deep-water fishermen, who must work round-the-clock in the chill sea breeze and soaking spray. And they had those lobster hands. You could see that each time they raised them up to drag from their cigarettes, every time they lifted a Styrofoam cup of steaming java—those swollen, scarlet, baseball-glove mitts of theirs. The hauling of nets and line soaked in brine does that. It's a dead giveaway. I sat for forty minutes looking out across the water, then walked back north to the maritime museum, with its moored lightship New Bedford and other preserved vessels. I skirted the museum and continued walking north another five or six blocks. Then I walked back inland a few blocks and turned south again. I didn't know what I was looking for; I was getting the feel of the neighborhood, hoping something would catch my eye. I circled back in on the historic area, returned to my car, and drove south down Rodney French Boulevard, which circles around the promontory that holds old Fort Rodman. On the way I passed the gigantic rock hurricane barrier, which the town finally erected after several hurricanes almost destroyed the city. When bad weather threatens, huge steel floodgates can be closed along the barrier, sealing the harbor from tidal surges. I was willing to bet they'd been shut during the recent storm, too.

  All during this meandering I'm thinking to myself: a guy who's burgled my house hocks my radio on New Bedford's waterfront. He could simply be an out-of-work fisherman, or a guy on the lam who happened to pass by. But I don't think so; the location was too inconvenient for a casual thief.

  As things stood, the most obvious connection between New Bedford and Woods Hole was Bill Henderson's big stern trawler, the Highlander. So far I had not seen her. And it could be a long, long wait; a vessel that big could stay out on the Banks almost two weeks.

  I drove back into the center of town and resumed my walking tour. It was another hour and a half, past noon, when I found what I wanted: a guard shack at the gate of Fairhaven Fisheries, Inc., just inside the high cyclone fence of the plant's parking lot. It sat on a rise right over the harbor with a bird's-eye view of everything. I knocked at the heavy glass window of the shack. The pockmarked young man in the guard's uniform looked up from his magazine. I looked closely and saw that the magazine was the National Enquirer. Will Victoria Principal return to Dallas? What are Vanna White's views on quantum reality? Is the chewing gum diet for you? Will Michael Jackson go "all the way" and undergo surgery in Stockholm to become a blonde starlet? How does your license plate number affect your health? Inquiring minds want to know!

  "Yeah?" he managed, leaning down to speak through the metal air vent. Obviously a verbal chap. I pulled out my new county medical examiner's badge and flashed it.

  "I'm on business for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," I said in a low, confidential half-whisper. "I am investigating a series of burglaries and a murder. Follow?"

  "Uh, shuwa. Yeah, I follow." His eyes bugged out; he drummed his fingers fast on a two-page color photograph of Madonna, wearing a leather corset, eight-inch heels, net stockings, and a bowler hat. They've got nice pix; you've got to give them that. The Wall Street Journal can't touch them there.

  "It's absolutely imperative that I have somebody on my side who's reliable and smart. Frankly, you look like that kind of guy."

  "I do?" he said, amazed.

  I stepped back, a confused look on my face. I shuffled my feet, became reluctant. "Well, don't you think so? Maybe I misjudged you."

  "No. No. I can help. Who are you?"

  I explained I was a private physician on state business, and told him what I was looking for. I didn't lie, even a little bit. I didn't have to. The kid was all ears. To top it off, I took a twenty and slid it under the glass.

  "Consider this a personal gift, from me," I said. "But you go blabbing around and wreck everything, I'll be very disappointed. In fact, I'll be downright pissed off."

  "No prawblem, no prawblem."

  I said he was to keep a sharp eye out for the stern trawler Highlander, and call me the second she pulled in. Furthermore, without being seen by the boat's crew he was, if possible, to keep track of whoever came and went.

  "And just maybe you could remember what direction they go, okay?"

  "No prawblem. You gawt it."

  "And one more thing, Melvin," I said, reading his name off the badge on his shirt, "if we bust this thing wide open, do you have any objections if your name and picture appear in the newspapers?"

  "You kiddin'?" he said, practically wetting his fresh-pressed, gabardine guard's slacks. "No prawblem."' I handed him four phone numbers: my home, office, cottage, and Jack's number in Woods Hole. He told me to have a nice day, and I left for home.

  * * *

  "Okay, pal, what's up?"

  "Nothing's up. What do you mean?" It was the next morning, and we were having breakfast together in the kitchen.

  "I mean you're fidgeting around, Charlie. I know the signs."

  One of the things that's so maddening about Mary is that she always knows; she always finds out. I told her briefly about bribing the kid in the guard shack. She was less than elated.

  "What are you doing?" I asked, seeing her make a beeline for the phone.

  "Telling Joe. What else? Somebody's got to make sure you don't get killed."

  I protested that it was just a routine check, but she dialed anyway, and I went off to work.

  The call came at ten forty-five, just as I was suturing a third molar extraction on a comely twenty-year-old co-ed named Jo Anne Fleming. The call was taken by an assistant who fills in for Susan Petri when Susan's helping me with surgery. "We're in surgery, so tell him to hold," said Susan through her gauze mask. In her right hand she held the bloody suction tube, in her left, spare sutures.

  I finished the suture and shot Jo Anne with a hefty dose of penicillin, then picked up the phone.

  "Dawktah Adams? Melvin Combs, down at New Betfid?"

  "How you doing? See anything?"

  "Yeah. The Highlandah pulled in a few minutes ago down at the fish dawk. She'll be theah maybe six, seven howahs anyway—"

  "Good. Keep an eye out. Can you leave the shack?"

  "No. Nawt on duty. But I get a lunch break at eleven."

  "Good. Skip lunch and spend the time watching the boat and who comes and goes. Try to remember the people, and where they came from and where you think they're headed. And act casual and stay out of sight. I have a patient at one, but l should be down there by four."

  "No pra
wblem. Have a nice day."

  * * *

  I pulled into the asphalt area near Melvin's guard shack at four-fifteen. I wore a fisherman's long-billed cap, aviator glasses, jeans, and a dark-blue canvas pullover. Even if Henderson and son saw me from the Highlander, they wouldn't recognize me.

  Melvin's guard shack was occupied by a stranger. I skirted the tall cyclone fence and went down to the water. There was Henderson's big sixty-foot stern trawler, pulled up to the fish dock at Bertelsen's freezer warehouse and market. There were a slew of boats there, but the big, new Highlander stood out, white and sassy, against the other boats. I sat down on the concrete of a neighboring pier and leaned my back against a giant piling there and watched. I could've seen better with binoculars, but they'd attract attention. I pulled out my pipe, loaded it, and lit up. To all appearances I was just a waterfront hanger-on idling away a summer afternoon.

  It didn't take me long to find Melvin. He was standing, in his guard's uniform of course, flat against a wall of the warehouse, arms spread out and stuck to the wall, like a ledge clinger about to jump. Every so often he'd peep around the corner at the boat, then snap back behind the wall. Sweet jesus.

  I circled around and came up on him from behind.

  "Melvin—I said in a whisper.

  He screamed and jumped out of his skin, twirling around like a majorette in full view of the pier. I crooked a finger at him and motioned him in. "Great job, Melvin; I'1l take over now. What did you see?"

  "A bunch of 'em walked off the boat and headed up theah," he

  said, pointing south, past the giant freezer warehouses.

  "How many, and what did they look like?"

  "A big white-haired guy. I think he must be the ownah. And two youngah guys. They been gone, maybe hahf an howah."

  I slipped him another twenty, thanked him, and told him to walk casually back to the guardhouse as if nothing had happened.

  "I'll be in touch if I need you, Melvin. As you walk back, please don't look around.

  "No prawblem. Have a ni—"

  "Same to you. So long."

  The big white-haired guy would be Bill Henderson. Probably one of the younger guys was his son Terry. And perhaps the third guy a crew member. I ambled south, taking care not to appear to be in a hurry or have any definite destination, glancing toward the water. More warehouses, two fisheries offices, another dock, a marine tackle shop, and a repair shed. Another office attached to a hangar-type building and supply yard, another pier . . . and that appeared to be about all. I sat down on a clump of turf at the foot of an earthen rise that led back to the streets behind me, and puffed my pipe and sat. My gaze wandered from building to building. Nothing was unusual. Nothing seemed out of place. And also, I bet that Highlander did indeed have a hold full of fish. And so the crew, faced with several hours' wait until they could unload the catch, went up the line for a smoke and a gam. So what?

  I rose and walked still more, all the way past the big docks down to where Rodney French Boulevard began snaking its way down the peninsula toward the hurricane gates. Not seeing a soul down that way, I turned and headed back, idly kicking at stones, tin cans, and other junk. I passed a series of sheds, and then walked opposite the office that was attached to the hangar. Then I stopped in my tracks. Along with a pickup truck and a compact sedan, a big blue Mercedes was parked at the office building, and damned if it wasn't the same one I saw pull up near the Woods Hole dock the previous week. I was sure of it, and I knew it hadn't been there ten minutes before. So it had just arrived, which suggested its owner knew the Highlander had just arrived and had come to meet it.

  I looked at the office building. There was a blue and white logo on it showing a stylized Neptune with trident set against wavy blue lines. In a way, it reminded me of the logo of the Cousteau Society. Under it were the letters OEI. What the hell was OEI? Then I saw three words underneath the logo, but I was still too far away to read them. I had to get closer; I wanted the license plate number of the Mercedes, too.

  Ambling to and fro, stopping now and then to throw rocks into the water and watch the gulls, I got close enough. Hoping nobody inside was looking out, I read Oceanic Enterprises, Inc., on the side of the office building. I read the Mercedes's plate number and kept repeating it to myself until I got downrange far enough to write it down. I had also seen that the hangar-type building and office were joined together. Furthermore, there was a large work boat moored next to the hangar, which had been invisible from where I stood earlier. It was almost the size of the Highlander, but much older and rather beat-up. It was a western rig, which meant cabin and wheelhouse forward, with a long, wide deck aft and a very heavy-duty crane. She was built along the lines of a coastal trawler, with a high bow, pronounced sheer, and low freeboard aft. I also saw a big air compressor rig on the afterdeck, which I figured could be used to power air tools, or, more likely, air hoses for "hard-hat" diving. The yard was untidy, littered with marker buoys, oil drums, geared machinery, and long, canvas-covered mounds of something, perhaps pipe or reinforcing rods. Thus, I reasoned, OEI was some sort of marine engineering or salvage firm. I then tried to think what possible connection a firm like this would have with the murder of young Andrew Cunningham. My conclusion was: not much.

  I walked up past the guard shack, buttonholed Melvin, and said that regrettably the lead didn't look too promising, but that I'd let him know.

  "But nevertheless, don't mention this to anyone, Melvin. There has been a murder; there could be a lot of danger to you. Know what I mean?"

  "No prawblem. Have—"

  "Goodbye, Melvin."

  Driving back I realized that nothing much had come from my surveillance, of New Bedford. I had a tag number and the name of a firm. Also, perhaps, I had the knowledge that the Slinky connection, however tenuous, was much more promising than this

  one.

  * * *

  "Well, it's no surprise to me, sport, that you didn't bump into much down there" said Joe, making himself a giant G and T in a half-liter beer stein. Whenever he shows up at my house, either house, his first act is to see how big a dent he can make in my liquor cabinet. "While you were farting around in New Bedford, Paul Keegan and I were following up in Providence. Guess what? It so happens we stumbled onto a connected guy being held on other charges, i.e., possession with intent to sell. Name's Evans, nicknamed "the Drugstore." This guy's a prime candidate for the WPP—"

  "Witness Protection Program?"

  "You got it. And boy, is he gonna need it. See, the state guys nailed him sitting on four kilos of pure, uncut Columbian coke. Naturally, this puts a lot of pressure on the poor baby. So next thing you know, he's implicating several leading families of Providence, and who else but Falcone, our friend Slinky. Seems Slinky's been in on the nose-candy trade, despite his earlier cover-up. And it looks like we'll be getting enough evidence and testimony to put him away . . . maybe for good.

  "So Slinky was involving the Cunningham kid."

  "Yep, Yep, yep, yep. I think the pieces are just about in place. And think about it, Doc, Mary: between Slinky and the Drugstore, don't you think they'd know enough about drugs to doctor up a capsule to do the kid in?"

  "Possibly."

  "At least possibly. More like probably. You ask me, my original thinking on this thing is on the money: Slinky needed a safe cover to help run coke in from a mother ship. The Cunningham kid was in hock to him, so he'd be the likely bagman, using Woods Hole research vessels, which wouldn't be stopped and searched. It's perfect."

  "If it's so perfect," said Mary, "then why did Slinky go to Arthur Hagstrom last month and tell him the kid owed money? Huh?"

  "Good question, Mare," I said. Leave it to her to cut through to the meat.

  "Okay . . . you wanna know why? Simple: the kid refused to play ball. So Slinky went to Hagstrom as a last resort. And finally, he had to kill Andy because he wouldn't budge"

  I rocked my open palm back and forth. "Iffy, Joe. There it gets kinda iffy . .
. For example, how does your theory explain the two burglaries, huh?"

  "Simple: Andy had the coke and held out, planning to sell it himself for a fortune."

  "And you think this kid, smart enough to get into the best med schools in the country, and having grown up in the mob's home town, is gonna do that?"

  "Well, it's better than your research."

  "You mean you're not going to run down those items?"

  "Oh, sure. I'll humor you. In fact, that should be coming in this afternoon. Hell, the new computer networks are amazing. We plug into a phone line here, we get everything on companies. We plug into another line, we get everything we want on cars, trucks, vans, coast to coast. We can now contact the FBI's master fingerprint files via modem and get visualizations of prints on computer screens in seconds. Same with mug shots. You believe it?"

  Joe and I were sitting out on the brick terrace nursing our drinks while Mary pan-fried filet mignons in butter in a very hot skillet, searing the meat so the juice would stay in. We were going to eat them with gobs and gobs of béarnaise sauce. If you're going to go with cholesterol, go all the way. As Mae West said: "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." Fortunately, we were downing massive quantities of alcohol to cut the fat and keep our arteries clear.

  I mean, hey: your health is important.

  The phone rang for Joe, and he got up with a grunt and walked inside for it, doing that slow, rolling shuffle of his. It's like the walk of a big bull elephant. You see an elephant sauntering along and you figure he's dawdling, but in fact he's doing eight miles an hour.

  Joe was in there awhile, which told me my information might be coming in. I was correct; he came back holding his notebook. "Okay . . . here we go. First the car. The Mercedes Five-twenty SEL belongs to a Mr. Hunter Whitesides. Actually, H. V. Whitesides, the Fourth. Pahdon me . . . Whitesides has no priors, no record of any kind. So what we do with guys like this is, we go to the second tier. You know, run a check on financial standing, medical history, other personal stuff."