The Otter of Death

by Betty Webb

  More finger-counting. “Tuesday…No, Wednesday morning, when I visited Betancourt College to give a talk on the effect of pollution on local wildlife. I passed him in the Marine Sciences Building and waved hello. He didn’t wave back. It was just before, ah, ten. I don’t know if he was headed to his office or to a class. Maybe a class, come to think of it, because he seemed to be in a hurry. That’s only a guess. And he had a young woman with him.”

  Joe frowned. “A student?”

  “She was carrying books.”

  “Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Young. Pretty, if that’s what you’re getting at. Blond, blue-eyed. Perfect features. Boob job.” Stuart Booth was known for his affinity with female students. Especially pretty blondes with big boobs.

  “I meant, did she seem happy or…?”

  “Happy, I think. They went by pretty fast.”

  “How about him?”

  “He looked happy, too.”

  “Hmm.”

  I wondered if he was thinking the same thing—that Booth’s liking for the young and beautiful could have resulted in him lying dead out here in the Slough. He was, after all, a married man. And Booth’s wife...I shivered.

  “You okay, Teddy?”

  I swallowed. “I’m fine.”

  “Good, because we have to get on with this. Now tell me, did you ever—?”

  His question was interrupted by the arrival of two white vans, one filled with crime techs, the other, the van San Sebastian County used to transport the dead. Joe left to talk to one of the drivers, and since he hadn’t told me to stay put, I made my way through a growing crowd of curious liveaboarders and headed back toward the harbor. As unpleasant a person as Professor Stuart Booth, PhD, had been, I had no desire to see his body hauled out of the Slough.

  Just before reaching the Merilee, I was hailed by Lila Conyers, who was trying to shoo away a stubborn pelican from the deck of Just In Time, her decrepit houseboat. Despite the cheerleader-type good looks she had been born with, this morning the thirty-four-year-old Lila appeared almost as run-down as her houseboat. So thin it was worrying, she had dressed herself in a mismatched skirt and blouse she probably bought at the Salvation Army store. It’s hard to look like a fashion plate when your only income is a part-time job at Tiny Tots, the local day care center.

  “What’s going on at the Slough, Teddy?” she called, once the pelican flapped off.

  Since she would find out soon anyway, I told her, leaving out the part about the Zeno-7.

  “You’re sure it was Booth?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “But you say you didn’t see the body yourself.”

  “The sheriff did.”

  Her dull eyes livened. “So he’s really dead!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  Without another word, she went inside.

  Uneasy, I made my way along the dock to Slip No. 34, where the Merilee, my refitted 1979 thirty-four-foot CHB trawler, is moored. Now, a thirty-four-foot boat may sound roomy enough, but its actual walking-around room is less than twenty feet. The rest of the boat’s interior was taken up by the bulkheads, cabinets, forward and aft bunks, and the galley with its built-in eating area. Living on a boat isn’t for claustrophobes.

  So why do we liveaboarders do it? In many cases, it’s because rents in San Sebastian County have risen so high that the average person—i.e., Lila Conyers—can no longer afford them, whereas the monthly cost of a boat slip is far less onerous. That’s if you own a boat in the first place, which Lila did, having inherited the rickety old thing from her grandmother. But other people live on their boats because life in Gunn Landing Harbor is so peaceful. Usually, anyway. For them there is nothing more wonderful than waking in the morning to the gentle rocking of the leeside Pacific, the call of gulls, and the occasional visits of sea otters.

  Some of us live at the harbor for more personal reasons, and as I approached the Merilee, I spotted my own reason standing on the deck, dressed in something expensive whipped together by the Designer-of-the-Moment. Mother didn’t look happy and I suspected why. Ever since she had married criminal defense attorney Albert Grissom, her fifth husband, she’d developed the bad habit of listening to his police scanner. My suspicion proved correct when I stepped aboard and saw three Louis Vuitton suitcases next to her.

  “I’ll help you pack,” she said.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Mother.”

  “Haven’t I told you a million times to call me Caro?”

  Caroline Piper Bentley Mallory Huffgraf Petersen Grissom hated it when I called her Mother, so I always make certain I use the term at least once a day. Irritating point duly made, I repeated, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Oh, yes, you are. I’m not having my only child live in a place that allows murderers to run around loose.”

  Here’s the thing about Caro.

  Ever since my father embezzled millions and fled the country, leaving us destitute, she has been determined to marry her way back up the social ladder. For a former beauty queen who maintained her beauty via countless cosmetic surgeries, marrying up came easy, and each succeeding husband had been wealthier than the last. Now firmly back on the Social Register’s A-List, she felt secure enough to pay attention to areas other than financial portfolios, and kept herself busy poking into other people’s business. In some cases, her efforts had had beneficial results, such as the mentoring she’d been doing with at-risk girls. In other cases, she was a royal pain in the derrière. Specifically, mine.

  “There are no ‘murderers,’ plural, running around loose in Gunn Landing Harbor,” I told her. “Just one.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better? That there’s only, as you put it, ‘just one,’ singular, murderer out there? Don’t be foolish, Theodora. I want you off this boat and safe in Old Town with me, where I have alarms, security cameras, and a good guard dog.”

  “Are you talking about your Chihuahua?”

  “Feroz has excellent hearing. Now let’s get you packed.” She turned away from me and faced the Merilee’s cabin door. “Unlock it.”

  I crossed my arms in front of my scrawny chest. “No.”

  “Don’t you tell me no.” She crossed her own arms across her surgically endowed breasts.

  On the other side of the cabin door I could hear DJ Bonz whining. Un-judgmental, as all dogs are, he had always liked my mother and wanted to see her. Our face-off, or bust-off, could have lasted for hours, but was mercifully broken up by a deep male voice.

  “Teddy, I need you to make a formal statement. You can either do it here or at my office. Your choice.” Joe, with Deputy Emilio Gutierrez in tow. Both knew Caro well, and despite the circumstances, Emilio smiled when he saw her.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Grissom,” he said. “You’re looking particularly lovely today.”

  Emilio was descended from one of my great-great-great grandfather’s vaqueros in the halcyon days when we Bentleys owned most of San Sebastian County. A string of bad investments, lawsuits, the Depression, and my father’s crimes had changed all that, but the Gutierrezes’ loyalties remained steadfast. Last year, when Caro had been arrested on suspicion of murder, Emilio had made certain her cell was comfortable and her food better than the usual jailhouse slop. He had even allowed her manicurist to visit.

  Pointedly ignoring Joe, whom she loathed, Caro gave Emilio a friendly nod. “Emilio. How’s the baby?”

  “Growing by leaps and bounds, Mrs. Grissom.”

  “Delightful. I remember when you were born and you were so—”

  “Which do you prefer for your interview, Teddy?” Joe said, interrupting their lovefest. “Here or there?”

  As if he didn’t know. “Your office looks pretty good to me right now.”

  He winked. “Fine. In the meantime, don’t tell anyone about the…” he motioned to the pocket where he’d stash
ed the Zeno-7.

  Too late—I’d already told Lila. But I said, “I won’t. I promise.”

  Thirty seconds later I was in my old Nissan pickup, fleeing my irate mother, following Joe’s sheriff department cruiser inland to San Sebastian.

  Being questioned by the police is never pleasant, even when you’re engaged to the questioner. For one thing, there’s always a camera in the room, and I knew how scruffy I looked. My own outfit—paint-spattered jeans and faded maroon Blue Seas Marine Laboratory sweatshirt—was no more elegant than Lila’s morning wear, and my frizzy red hair had been not-too-neatly pulled back into a Dollar Store barrette. I hadn’t had a chance to shower yet, either, and knew I stank.

  Joe pretended not to notice. After running through the usual questions and duly writing down the answers, he asked, “I happened to see you talking to someone on the way back to the Merilee. Wasn’t that Lila Conyers?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “I hear she had some problems with Booth. Could you catch me up on that?”

  “Time marches on, Joe. Her trouble happened fourteen or fifteen, whatever, years ago when Lila was a sophomore at UC San Bertram. Ancient history.”

  “Sexual harassment, wasn’t it? She claimed he was always making sexual innuendoes and that several times he tried to get her into his car as she was walking through the student parking lot. I’m thinking that if the harassment was that bad, surely the school would have done something to stop it. Like fire him.”

  Suddenly the interview didn’t feel all that friendly.

  I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but failed. “The university formed a committee—all males, by the way—and after a short investigation, declared there was nothing to her allegations. They even hinted that, if anything, Lila was the harasser. Can you say, ‘institutional sexism’? The bastards said that, unlike the other girls, Lila refused to take no for an answer, and started showing up places she knew Booth would be. He played off that by telling the committee she even sat under his bedroom window several times, crying. She denied everything, but his version carried more weight than hers, so…”

  “She dropped out of school, right? Never got her degree?”

  I muttered something about him being correct.

  “My sources tell me Ms. Conyers was majoring in Marine Science, that she hoped to eventually work at that place down the coast.”

  “Blue Seas Marine Laboratory, yeah.”

  “Didn’t she have a breakdown or something before she dropped out? Had to be hospitalized?”

  “It was just for a couple of weeks.” Months, actually.

  “Hmm. She’s working part-time at a day-care center now, isn’t she?”

  “It’s a nice day-care center!”

  Joe narrowed his eyes. “What was Ms. Conyers’ reaction when you told her about Booth?” With his light brown skin courtesy of his Hispanic father, and blue eyes courtesy of his Irish mother, Joe is a startlingly handsome man, but right now he looked downright ugly.

  “Who said I told Lila about Booth?”

  “Oh, please. What was her reaction?”

  I hate it when people keep asking the same question over and over again. “She didn’t say much.”

  “Teddy. What did she say?”

  Sighing, I quoted, “‘So, he’s really dead. Good.’”

  Feeling like a Judas, I slunk my way back to the Merilee. At least DJ Bonz and Miss Priss, my one-eyed Persian, were glad to see me. Priss even rubbed up against me, purring loudly, but that might have been because I’d stopped off at Phil’s Sea Food Market and picked up some herring for Maureen. Pushover that I am, I gave one to Priss. Bonz looked on patiently, knowing that I never fed one without feeding the other. His patience was rewarded with a boneless piece of pork chop from my mini-refrigerator.

  I was cooking myself a belated breakfast when I heard someone shout, “Permission to come aboard, Captain!” Darleene Bauer again. Not that permission was necessary, since she had already clambered onto the Merilee’s deck. I had always been amazed that a woman in her seventies could be so spry. Then again, sailors tend toward more fitness than landlubbers.

  “The body’s gone,” she informed me, after stepping into the cabin area and plunking herself down at the small galley table.

  “Already?” I flipped my two eggs onto a paper plate, grabbed a fork, and began eating while standing up.

  Darleene eyed the eggs with distaste. “The cops—detectives, I think—and techs are still there, even put up a tent to shade them while they work. Saw one just like it on Law & Order. Weird, though. Makes a crime scene look like a wedding reception. So who do you think murdered Booth?”

  Between bites, I said, “What makes you think someone murdered him? Maybe it was an accident.” By the time Darleene arrived at the Slough, I had already turned over the cell phone and its horrifying picture to Joe.

  “Techs had a problem with the body bag, and I saw the hole in his head before they got him stuffed all the way in. That was a bullet wound, for sure.”

  “Since when are you an expert on bullet wounds?”

  “I used to hunt.”

  My mouth fell open and a tendril of yolk dribbled down my chin. Darleene had been a vegan as long as I’d known her.

  “Oh, don’t look so surprised, Teddy. Nobody’s born vegan. Before Lionel had his coronary, we both hunted. Deer. Elk. Grouse. Pheasant. Fish, too. Lionel once caught an eleven-hundred pound blue marlin down in Cabo, that year’s record haul, and he hung the gaudy thing above our fireplace. It wasn’t half as impressive as my grizzly head, but in forty years of marriage you learn to make compromises. You’ll be finding that out for yourself pretty soon, won’t you?”

  She reached down and scratched Bonz behind his ear, making his entire body wriggle with pleasure. Straightening up, she said, “Are you going to be there next Monday?”

  It took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. “Oh, you mean the Otter Conservancy meeting at the church. Of course I’ll be there. That reminds me…” I scrabbled in the drawer where I had stashed the partially filled-out otter report. Like the other volunteers, I’d kept track of the otter count on my phone, then transferred the numbers to the official form Darleene had given me. “I haven’t had a chance to type it up more neatly, what with me finding Booth and having to talk to the authorities. But I did make it all the way to the northern end of the Slough, where his sector begins. Uh, began.”

  She took the paper, which still smelled faintly of chlorophyll-rich Slough water. “No problem. I’ll type it up for you. Given your love for typos, I always have to redo it anyway.”

  Stuffing the report into her pocket, she started up the ladder to the deck, then stopped on the top rung. “One more thing, Teddy. Don’t bother trying to figure out who killed Booth. Whoever did it has done us all a favor. Besides, I’d hate to see something happen to you.”

  A friendly warning?

  Or a threat.

  Chapter Three

  I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the Merilee. When you live on a boat and work full time, you tend to let the household stuff slide until your bare feet stick to the filthy teak decking and you run out of clean clothes—something Joe kept pointing out.

  “Houses are much more sensible,” he’d said, more than once.

  True, but whoever had set up the facilities at Gunn Landing Harbor recognized the needs of us floating homeowners and had installed a series of public showers and a laundromat. Because the damp ocean air encourages mildew, the washers and dryers were almost always in use, necessitating a long waiting time.

  Wherever there’s a wait, there’s gossip, and laundromats are no different. As I was stuffing two zoo uniforms, underwear, and bedding into an extra-large washer (I’m too unfussy to sort) the gossip train pulled into the station with the arrival of Kenny Norgaard. Somewhere in his late fifties, he lived on the High Life, a 1969 Stephens Flybridge motor yacht.

  Kenny was one of those people you often find in m
arinas, having inherited just enough money that he didn’t need to work, but not enough to allow him to indulge in the kind of high life his boat was named for. With too much time on his hands, he spent his days lounging on deck sipping margaritas until he ran out of tequila and had to wait until his monthly trust fund check arrived before stocking up on more. Over the years he had learned to spend his dry days dropping in on his neighbors to cadge food and drink. They always complied, because Kenny’s gossip was the best.

  Today, after plopping down his own laundry basket on the floor, he started right in. “I take it you’ve all heard about Booth?”

  Murmurs of assent from everyone present.

  Then my washer started up, and it was so noisy I had to strain to hear what Kenny was saying.

  “In case you didn’t know,” he continued, “there’s a rumor going around that it wasn’t an accident, that someone actually shot him. No wonder, considering. But say what you will about Booth, and there’s sure plenty to say, he was one slick operator.”

  “Are you serious? We’ve heard some damning stories about his behavior with young women.” This, from Ruth Donohue, a rawboned soccer player from Florida who now lived on the Clear Light with Dee Dee Pascal, a video game designer.

  “Never make judgments based on hearsay.” For once, Kenny, the master of light repartee, sounded serious.

  There was a brief pause before Dee Dee, softer-looking and more easygoing than Ruth, took over. “Where there’s smoke there’s often a fire. Not always, I grant you, but often enough. Anyway, we heard that after Lila’s harassment accusation, Booth had to hurry up and get married. Harper Betancourt was between boyfriends, so…” She shrugged her plump shoulders. “Not that he loved her, or she him, but it kept the scandal-mongers quiet. Besides, Harper had all that Betancourt money, so why not? It made her father happy. Two birds with one stone, if you catch my meaning.”

  “Which proves absolutely nothing.” Kenny gave Dee Dee a crooked smile. Not that it was necessary. No one could ever stay mad at Kenny.