by Jack Lynch
“The bustards, I’ll work that all out for them one day soon,” he promised. “Old tricks for new dogs. Just like with the black bird. We’ll take care of them all—yes sir, yes sir.”
He finished replacing the light bulb, but instead of climbing back down he stood for a moment, staring out the length of the dock and down the Bay.
“Like thunder out of China we’ll go marching,” he told himself. His head bobbed a couple of times. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” He climbed back down the ladder and went to retrieve the metal pinch bar.
“Thank you there, mister, thank you,” he told me.
“I take it you work here.”
“Yes sir, that’s my job. I take care of the docks. Handle the chores, paintin’ and scrapin’, do the odd bit of work and my share of the marchin’. Over and over and up and down.” His eyes were staring down the dock again.
“Who owns these docks and the land back there?”
“Oh yes sir, that’s my boss.” His eyes wandered around with a frown riding atop them. “Yes sir, my boss…That would be—let’s see now, Mr. Beamer, he’s my boss. He takes good care of his men, he does. Mr. Beamer, he’s been my boss now ever since I came to work on the docks here.”
“Does he have an office nearby?”
“No, no. No office. No sir. He lives out there at the end of Number Two Pier.” He pointed vaguely off to the left.
“Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a man I was told lives here. A younger man named Dewer. Calls himself Red. Lives on a boat, I’m told.”
“Oh yes sir, that’s right, he does that. Big strapping young fellow, Mr. Dewer. He lives on a boat here like you said. I had a girl in Australia one time, you know. Yes sir. She told me of the wallabies, and we danced the whole night. Yes sir, I’ve been there. Uh-huh.”
“Sounds nice. But this Mr. Dewer, does he live on this dock we’re standing on?”
“Oh no, no sir, I wouldn’t say that. He’s living aboard the old Donita Rose. She’s a good boat. Could still take her fishing, with a bit of help. Over on Six Pier, on the right. Clear to the end. That’s where Mr. Dewer lives. But he’s not my boss, oh no sir. I’m the Soldier, and I work on the docks here.”
“How’s that? Is Soldier your name?”
“Yes sir, it’s me. Soldier Smith, mister.” He turned back toward the shore end of the dock. “The bustards. They’ll see all about it, like in the newspapers.”
I thanked him and left him mumbling as I went back to the parking area. I noticed now that there were numerals carved into posts on either side of each of the piers. They were as weathered as my friend Soldier, and nearly as difficult to read. I started out Six Pier.
Houseboat-living at Marinship Basin appeared to be a rich soup of the plain and the fancy. I passed a couple of snazzy, newly built structures. One was a spacious, two-story floating home of redwood, the other a long craft resembling Cleopatra’s barge with a roof on it. In between them was an old-timer. It wasn’t an integrated structure, but was made up of an old, rotting, wooden platform attached to Styrofoam floats. A couple of the floats were trying to work their way loose from beneath the platform. Parked atop the platform was a dinky, rust-colored house trailer that looked as if it had been manufactured back when motels were known as motor courts. Some sort of bushy plant was growing out of a bucket in one corner of the platform, and a radio inside the trailer was playing rock music.
The Donita Rose appeared to be the only operable boat on the pier, which explained its position at the end. It was thirty to forty feet long, tied perpendicular to the end of the pier. Rubber tires lashed together in pairs hung from railing posts to act as fenders between the hull and pier. A narrow, three-step platform bolted to the end of the pier afforded access to the boat’s deck when the hull drifted into the end of the dock. I waited a moment, then hopped aboard and clambered over the rail.
“Hello, the boat! Anybody home?”
Nobody answered. I picked my way around the rear of the pilot house, stepping over old manila lines and rotting nets. I didn’t see any signs of life. I went back around to the dock side and rapped on a door near the rear of the housing. I called out again. Still no response. I tried the knob. It turned, but before I could open the door I was stopped by a voice behind me.
“Looking for somebody?”
I glanced over my shoulder. Nobody was on the dock. Then I saw her, on the roof of the tidy, single-story houseboat about twenty feet down the pier. She looked at me over the edge of a wicker lounger—a tall lady in her late twenties or so. She had long, dark red hair the color of an Irish setter, but she didn’t have the light, freckled skin that usually goes with red hair. Her eyes were hidden behind dark, reflective sunglasses. Her nose was straight and narrow, and she had a wide mouth that made her look as if she knew every secret in the world. When I was younger, I would have fallen in love on the spot.
Also, she didn’t appear to have any clothes on. Not that she sat up far enough to offer you all the sights, but just enough to show an unbroken line of body. I went over to the boat railing.
“I was looking for Mr. Dewer. He doesn’t seem to be home.”
“Either that, or he’s dead,” she told me, sinking back into the wicker.
“Why do you say that?”
“When you hailed the boat it was enough to scramble the whole pier. I was asleep, myself.”
“Sorry,” I told her, resting one foot on the lower pipe railing and stretching my neck some. “Any idea where I can find him?”
“You a friend of his?”
“It might turn out that way. I wanted to talk to him about a little job.”
Her head came over the side of the wicker again, and she lifted off her dark glasses to peruse my sports jacket and tie. “You don’t look like you’re in his line of work.”
“Clothes don’t always make the man,” I told her. “Nor the woman, for that matter.”
She laughed down at me and sat up a little higher. “You’re cute. What’s your name?”
“Peter Bragg. What’s yours?”
“Shirley.”
“Are you Dewer’s girl?”
“I’m not anybody’s girl.”
“You should be.”
“Why? It would just cut down on a lot of fun.”
She was smiling at me in a way that would make me either look away or quit work for the day. I looked away. “It would be swell flirting with you the rest of the afternoon, Shirley, but I’m kind of in a hurry to find Dewer.”
“Sure you’re not a bill collector?”
“Honest. I only put on the tie this morning because I was calling on somebody I figured probably would be pretty correct about such things. Are all you people on the docks this nervous?”
“Every one. What time is it?”
I looked at my watch. “Almost five.”
She murmured something that sounded like a curse and rolled out of the wicker lounger on the side away from me and slipped into a yellow terry cloth robe without showing me any more of herself than just enough to get my hopes up. She came back to lean on the wooden railing enclosing her roof.
“He should be home soon. He works at a small boat yard up at the Clipper Yacht Harbor. Know where that is?”
“Behind the Army Engineers model, isn’t it?”
“That’s it. Bradley Boat Works. I’d offer you a cup of coffee and let you wait for him here, but I have to start getting ready for work.”
“That’s okay. Maybe some other time. Sort of wish I had a neighbor like you myself.”
“Maybe you will someday. Live around here?”
“I live in Sausalito, but up back toward town. I’ve got kind of a dumpy three rooms down under an old frame house.”
“You can’t have a very large family.”
“Just me,” I beamed up at her.
“And you don’t strike me as gay, either,” she said, smiling again. “What luck.”
“Actually, I’ve thought about trying life on a houseboat some
day. Are there many openings around here?”
“No, things are pretty scarce. It’s about the last low-cost housing in the county, except for over in the projects. And it’s going to get worse.”
“Why’s that?”
She nodded in the direction of one of the other piers. “That damn Beamer and his friends, with their big ideas of turning this into Corona del Mar North. A lot of us are going to get kicked out before it’s over with.”
“They told you that?”
“No, but it’ll happen. I hear things around town, and there are some strange people who’ve been prowling the docks lately.”
“Does that mean no more houseboats?”
“Just about. They might let a few of the newer ones that cost about fifty thousand dollars stay. Most of the rest will be tossed out.”
“What will you do then?”
“Who knows? Maybe we can get a tow up the Sacramento River, or maybe we’ll just have to beach and burn our homes.”
“I thought this big project was supposed to have some kind of county sanction, providing jobs for the people in Marin City. Can’t the county force them to provide alternate berths for you?”
She just laughed. “Are you kidding? They’ve been trying to get us out of here for twenty-five years or more. Not me, but people on the houseboats. We crud up the water some and don’t pay taxes on our homes, and we run to a more independent turn of mind. We bug them. And you talk about alternative berths.”
“Sorry. I haven’t been following the houseboat wars too closely. How much longer do you think you have here?”
“A year, maybe. The major part of the development is going in a little east of us. They just started it. The yacht harbor’s one of the last things they’ll get to.”
“Can’t you people organize or something?”
“You’re talking to the chairman of the Save Our Ships Committee. I’ve been spending so much time up at the county civic center they think I work there. But you don’t know what buck-passing is until you try to pin down those people. When they first started talking about the project, we were told it wouldn’t affect us. That was a year or more ago. Now I think there’s been a change of signals somewhere. They probably plan to put up most of the rest of the project before they tell us they need our space. The county people say that until we’re notified officially that we’ll be booted out, there’s nothing they can do. They told us to come back and make some noise when it actually happens. We’ll do that, of course, but whether or not it’ll do any good…”
She shrugged. It made a corner of the robe fall away from one shoulder. It was a nice-looking shoulder, and I told her so. She laughed again.
“I like your style, stranger. You ever go into town to do some drinking?”
“I’ve been known to do that from time to time.”
“Why don’t you stop by the Sea Deck some night? I waitress there.”
“First chance I get,” I promised.
“Great.” She gave me another smile and turned from the railing. The boat apparently had an outside stairway on the other side of the house. I stood there a moment enjoying the afterglow. Her smile was the sort I never got any longer once people knew what I did for a living.
THREE
I turned back to Dewer’s pilot house. I was tempted to take a fast look around inside, as long as the door was unlocked, but Shirley said he was due home soon. Without a better story than the one I was ready to give him right then, I didn’t want him to catch me prowling around inside. I went back up the pier and sat in my car for a while.
A couple of joggers came huffing up the bicycle path that parallels Bridgeway where it merges with Highway 101. Something else was different there from a couple of years back. Young hookers used to show up there on sunny afternoons to work the side of the road. They were beautiful girls, some of them, who would stick out their thumbs at the traffic leaving Sausalito. It used to confuse some of the drivers who innocently stopped to offer them a ride. The girls would ask if they wanted a date, and tell them the price. It used to be fun to drive by and see the girls there, grinning and thumbing. It lasted about ten years, before stuffy elements in town mounted a campaign to get rid of them. The city posted No Stopping signs along that stretch of road, and the cops busted a few daredevils who ignored the signs. The girls left, eventually; where to, I had no idea.
Soldier Smith came up the dock with the ladder over one shoulder and carrying his metal pinch bar. He gave the corner post at the end of the dock a vicious swipe with the bar. He looked as if he were mumbling about dogs again. He started out the pier where he said Beamer lived.
A few minutes later Dewer showed up. He was driving a foreign sports car I didn’t recognize, but it didn’t look as if it had too many miles on it. I got out as he was walking toward the entrance to Six Pier.
“Mr. Dewer?”
“That’s my name,” he said softly.
I launched one hand as if he were the key to a million-dollar bank vault. “My name is Bragg. Frankie Spain said I might find you here.”
The frown on his face deepened. “Spain? Who’s that?”
“A guy in the city who owns a couple of movie theaters. He said you’d done some work for a man in the same line of work. Cookie Poole.”
He remembered. And from then on he didn’t like me.
“So?”
“I’m up from L.A. I work with some guys turning out a new breed of films. You know, for cable TV. We’re getting ready to shoot one up here. Kind of a comedy about some counterculture types living in boarded-up barracks at one of the old army posts hereabouts. Fort Cronkhite, maybe. There’s some chase scenes with MPs and things. Some good-looking girls. There’ll be quite a bit of nudity in it, but like I said, these won’t be as raw as they’ve been in the past. And it’ll pay more. I asked Frankie to suggest some local talent who can work without their clothes on in front of a movie camera. Yours was one of the names he mentioned.”
“That’s funny. I never worked for him.”
“Frankie keeps up on the competition. He saw you in one of Poole’s films. This would be a good chance for you, Dewer. Just a step or two away from Hollywood legitimate, if you’re interested.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not? A chance like this comes along, and you’re not interested?”
“That’s right. If I wanted to be in movies I wouldn’t go about it like that.”
“Well, what the hell, if you do it for the girls, I can understand that, and let me tell you, my friend, some of the babes we’ve got lined up for this one would make a bishop weep.”
“It’s scum work,” he said softly. “I did it for a while to get some money together when I hit town. I’ve retired.”
And with that he left me standing there with my best leer on my face. He went on down the dock without a backward glance.
I’d picked the wrong story to tell him. So if I talked to him again I’d need a story that not only might get me what I wanted to know, but also would explain away the first story I’d given him. Not every move you make is a smart one in this business.
I got back into my car and drove up Bridgeway to the road leading over to the Clipper Yacht Harbor. I found the boat works where Shirley said Dewer worked, only it turned out he didn’t really work there. A man named Burke, who was part owner of the place, told me Dewer was just using the yard facilities to refit a boat he’d recently bought, a thirty-foot cabin cruiser called the Hamilton Belle.
“Some people prefer to do the work themselves, if they know what they’re doing,” Burke told me. “We lease them the yard space and rent them whatever gear they need.”
“How long has he been here?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“Did he pay you up front?”
“He gave us a deposit. And from the quality material he’s putting into the Belle, I’d guess money’s no problem.”
I thanked him and went back to the car with more lines on my face. Dewer didn’t s
eem like a person who would have to act in pornographic movies to make a little money, not when he was driving a nearly new sports car and had just bought a boat and was working full time refitting it instead of getting up and going off to a job every day like the rest of us. The kiss-off he’d given me was firm. He didn’t need the money. So why else would he appear in one of Cookie’s movies? So maybe he could try to blackmail Melody’s father in some way? That line of thinking was nonsense.
I drove back up Bridgeway to the pay phone out in front of the Big G Supermarket. There I had a nice surprise. Somehow I hadn’t expected Cookie Poole to have a listing in the phone book, but he was there, with an address over in Tamalpais Valley, a couple of miles away. I wrote down the address and checked it against a county map I carry in the car. His house turned out to be a little off the beaten path. It was on Eastwood, which was off Northern, which was off Shoreline Drive, the road that went over Mt. Tamalpais to Stinson Beach. The streets were all part of a meandering grid nestled against the lower ridge of the mountain.
Eastern ended in a cul-de-sac. Houses of varying size and newness were strung along it as it climbed the ridge. I drove on up to the end of the street, turned around and parked about twenty yards above Cookie’s place. The strong afternoon winds that gusted off the mountain at that time of day during the spring had died down. It left a calm to the air. The neighborhood was quiet. Maybe everyone was in having an early dinner. I went up to the front door of the Poole house and rang the bell. I waited a moment, then rapped on the door some. Nobody was stirring around inside. Shadows were lengthening on the street. I tried the bell again, but it didn’t raise anybody.
There were windows at chest height on both sides of the door. The one to the left had draw drapes across it. The window on the right had drapes, but they weren’t fully closed. I went over to see what the inside looked like. I couldn’t tell all that much. I could see the corner of a chair and some stereo equipment on a cabinet against the far wall. And then I saw something else. It was getting dark inside the house, and I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a man’s shoe and the lower part of a man’s leg on the floor at the extreme limit of my vision.
