Death in Deep Water

by Paul Kemprecos

  “Go get him, Soc!” Jill yelled.

  Arnold was splitting a gut laughing.

  With the element of surprise gone, I flailed after Oscar, splashing through the water, scattering terrified penguins in my path like leaves before the wind. Squawking birds rocketed in all directions and I lost sight of Oscar in the feathery confusion. A second later, I saw him in a corner. I advanced toward him. He swam back and forth in panic. We were both probably thinking the same thing. Why me?

  Oscar zipped past on my right. I tried to grab him. Missed. At the far end of the pool, the water depth dropped sharply to about ten feet deep to accommodate an underwater viewing window. Oscar dove. I chased him past the window, waved to a couple of startled Oceanus staffers watching the show from the other side of the glass, and shot to the surface.

  He was back in shallow water, where he zigzagged, then headed for an island about dead center in the pool. It was the same slate color as the rest of the artificial rocks, around three yards wide and a couple tall. Frightened penguins crowded onto a ledge like the orchestra playing “Nearer My God to Thee” on the deck of the Titanic.

  I caught my breath and moved slowly around the island. The penguins tried to keep the miniature mountain between them and me. I pulled myself onto the island and the birds bunched for safety near the summit. It was hard to pick Oscar out of the moving muddle. I saw a glimpse of red. Damn, the tab was on the right flipper; Oscar’s was on the left.

  Aha! Saw him.

  I crawled up the side of the mountain, reached into a mass of wet feathers, and slipped on slimy droppings, smashing my elbow. I had the little monster. He squawked pitifully, but I had no mercy.

  “Got you now, Oscar,” I growled. “I just love plump little penguins for dinner.”

  Hugging him to my chest, I slipped off the island and made my way to the edge of the pool. Jill was jumping up and down. “You were terrific, Soc.” She reached over and took Oscar gently from my arms. “I’ll take him for his shot.”

  I climbed out of the pool. Mike Arnold was waiting for me.

  “Good job,” he said. “So good you’ll get the chance to do it again.”

  “Wouldn’t a net be easier?”

  “Might hurt the little guys. You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

  My skinned elbow burned, but I decided I was going to live. My shorts were stained with penguin droppings. I headed toward the locker room. “I’m going to change into some dry clothes.”

  “You can do that later,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I’ve got other stuff for you to do.”

  Arnold was right. It would have been a waste of time changing into clean clothes. The jobs he assigned me were the Oceanus equivalent of the Augean stables. I cleaned debris out of the seal tanks and shoveled sea-lion manure. Near the end of the day, I finished swabbing down the sidewalks. Arnold wasn’t around. Probably tired himself out issuing all those orders. Looked at my watch. It was after five o’clock. No one had told me it was past quitting time, but I assumed the workday was over because the park was quiet and apparently deserted. Good time to snoop.

  With bucket and mop in hand, I strolled around the park. I stopped to chat with Froggy, who greeted me with a foghorn blast, and with a stuck-up sea lion who kept his nose in the air while I tried to get his attention. Then I sauntered across the central plaza to the orca stadium.

  An ascending ramp took me behind the auditorium to the seating-section entrance. The wide portal was barred by an eight-foot-high steel-rod gate that was more for show than security. I put the mop and bucket in a corner, climbed the gate, and dropped down on the other side. White arrows painted on the walls pointed the way through a passageway that came out into the top bleacher section of an amphitheater.

  At the center of the amphitheater, with bleachers on three sides, was a large tank as big as two Olympic swimming pools. It was in the shape of a figure eight, with the larger part of the pool facing the bleachers. At its narrowest juncture was an oval island surmounted by two flagpoles. Flying from each flagpole was a sea-green triangular pennant with a picture of a leaping killer whale on it.

  The afternoon sun had fallen behind the bleachers, casting the pool partially in shadow. I descended to a poolside stage around twenty by twenty feet, built about six inches under the water level. My sneakers were soaked from mopping anyhow, so I stepped over a metal guardrail, sloshed to where the edge of the pool dropped off, and scanned the dark green bottle-glass surface.

  Nothing stirred, so I called out: “Hey Rocky, are you home?”

  Home . . . hom . . . ho . . . my voice echoed in the stillness.

  For a few moments there was nothing.

  Kawoof!

  The sound came from the far side of the pool.

  A dorsal fin as tall as a small child emerged and moved in on me like a heat-seeking missile homing in on a target. Halfway to the edge of the pool the fin disappeared and its place was taken by a huge head that came straight out of the water with hardly a ripple on the surface. The chin was white, whiter than buffed porcelain. The upper snout and cranium were black except for an elongated white patch behind the eyes. The head swiveled from left to right a couple of times, and the jaws opened wide to show off more teeth than I thought possible in a single mouth. The head disappeared and the dorsal fin again moved toward me.

  Killer whales aren’t dangerous to human beings. That’s what people had been telling me. But the pointed fin heading my way marked the underwater movement of several tons of muscle and teeth. Unanswered questions swirled in my head. Okay, so I’m a coward. I like to think it was simple survival mechanisms cutting in. I splashed through the ankle-deep water with all the grace of a crippled flamingo, and hastily climbed off the stage into a third row bleachers.

  None too soon. Within seconds, the big black-and-white head burst from the water to rest its chin where I’d just been standing and Rocky opened his mouth to show off his impressive dental work.

  From the safety of the bleachers, I checked him out. This was one formidable animal. He’d have no trouble biting a man in half. At the same time, he projected some of the playfulness you saw in dolphins.

  I climbed down the bleachers and walked along between the raised side of the tank and the lowest row of seats. The pool was enclosed by a thick plastic wall that allowed spectators, particularly those sitting in the high-risk rows designated as splash area, to see underwater. Rocky followed me with his head, then slipped backward off the stage. He swam over to the wall and hung vertically, with just his nose pointing out of the water, keeping afloat with gentle sweeps of his paddle-shaped fins. He could have been a very large inflatable pool toy, and not the top predator in the sea. But there was no mistaking the power lurking under the rubbery skin that covered an elongated body nearly five times as long as I was tall.

  Rocky was looking at me. But it went beyond that. He was studying me. He was trying to decide who I was.

  “Hello, Rocky,” I said. “My name is Soc.”

  He hung there, eight tons of him, floating in the sea-green water as weightless as a bubble. Then he sank a few feet, pivoted gracefully, and dove into the depths until he was almost out of sight. After a moment, he returned to where I could see him and posed there, horizontal this time, with his snout inches from the glass. I moved closer. The unspoken question ran through my mind.

  Did you kill Eddy Byron?

  Maybe whales could read minds.

  Well? Did you do it?

  Less than a foot separated us, he in his world, me in mine.

  “C’mon, Rocky,” I said out loud, “give me something to go on. Just a shake of your bony head.”

  He just stared at me with his impenetrable black eye. I shrugged and turned away. Halfway up the bleachers, I heard a loud splash and looked back. Rocky was breaching, shooting out of the water at an angle, then arcing prettily back into th
e pool, his flight ending in a tall geyser. He did it once more and disappeared beneath the water. I went back and climbed the gate, picked up my mop and pail, and headed to the storeroom, thinking about Rocky’s strange dance. He had, in his own way, given me a message that was very clear once I took my brain out of neutral. He was telling me he was glad to have company.

  Dan Austin intercepted me on the way to the locker room. His shirt was unwrinkled and the slacks had a razor crease in them. His Nike sneakers were pristine white. I hadn’t seen myself in a mirror, but I knew I wouldn’t make the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly. My shorts were damp, my sneakers squished with every step, and my shirt must have looked as if someone had used it to dry dishes. The contrast with his outfit wasn’t lost on Austin.

  “I guess Mike Arnold gave you a rough time,” he said. “Sorry about that. He stormed into my office, pissed off because I had hired you without consulting him. I had to toss him something, so I said he could assign your duties.”

  I looked down at my elbow, scraped raw from the madcap chase after Oscar. “He followed your orders.”

  “Look,” Austin said. “After you change into some dry things, I’ll take you over to the orca stadium to meet Rocky.”

  “Thanks, but we just introduced ourselves. I was near the auditorium mopping up, so I climbed the fence. It wasn’t very hard.”

  Austin’s brow wrinkled in disapproval. He was a man who wanted everything according to his schedule. He couldn’t have known I don’t work that way, but he did now. He quickly covered his annoyance with a phony smile. “Good. I would have taken you over earlier, but I got too involved. Did you learn anything today?”

  “Yes. I learned a penguin is harder to catch than a greased pig. But not much beyond that. This is only my first day.”

  “Of course. I guess I’m being impatient.”

  “That’s understandable given the circumstances.” I started off, then stopped. “By the way, do you have any material on killer whales? I’d like to read up on the subject. Might help if I knew what I was dealing with.”

  “Come up to my office.”

  I followed him up the stairs and a few minutes later was walking to the locker room with an armful of books. Sally Carlin came by and saw my load.

  She smiled. “Doing some heavy reading?”

  “Just some homework. I thought I should know more about the critters around here. The only fish I ever took care of was a guppy I had when I was seven. His name was Moby. I gave him too much food one day and he died.”

  “Maybe we’d better not let you feed our animals.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be too busy scrubbing sidewalks.”

  “I guess Mike gave you a hard time today. Don’t take it personally. He can be rough on everyone, even me.”

  I let out a loud stage sigh. “The only thing I lost was my dignity, but I suppose you have to give up something to be in show biz. I think I deserve a reward for today, though. A cold beer would be just right. Would you care to join me?”

  “I’d love to. I’ll wait for you outside the locker room.”

  I changed back to my jeans and T-shirt. My water-logged sneakers were a lost cause. There wasn’t much I could do about them, so I wrung the water out as best I could and put them on. On the way to my car I saw Jill leaving in a beat-up dark green Volvo station wagon. On the bumper was a sticker that said, This Car Brakes for Whales. I waved to Jill, who waved happily back. Sally and I left the lot together, with me following her red Honda to a place she said the staff hung out. Minutes later, we were in a funky art deco movie bar on Route 28. It was decorated with posters of Marilyn in The Misfits, Cagney in Public Enemy. The mug of beer for a buck and a half wasn’t a bad deal. Sally ordered a margarita.

  We made small talk for a few minutes, then I asked Sally how she had come to Oceanus. She said she was from Hartford. She majored in marine biology at UConn.

  “How did you get into the marine mammal field?” I asked.

  “It was a book I read in college. It was written by a delphinist named John C. Lilly. He said dolphins were probably as bright as humans, because their brains were as big and as complex as man’s. He thought people might actually be able to speak to dolphins someday if they got rid of their preconceived notions about man’s place in the universe and started thinking unconventionally about dolphin research.”

  “What do you think?”

  She pondered the question. “Lilly came in for a lot of criticism from other scientists. They said just because a dolphin’s brain is big doesn’t mean it can communicate with man. I guess they were right, but I do think that there is something unexplainable there. I sense it when I’m working with the animals, that sometimes we communicate on a nonverbal level.”

  “Arion’s dolphin?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s an old Greek legend. Arion was the best harp player in Greece. The crew of the boat he was on grabbed him and said they were going to kill him and take his money. They said he could throw himself into the sea if he wanted to, which he did, but first he played a beautiful song on his harp. And when he jumped into the water, a dolphin who’d been attracted by the music came and carried him safely to land. Nonverbal communication. You still haven’t told me how you got to Oceanus.”

  “After college I worked for the Connecticut marine fisheries division. I did shellfish pollution surveys and things like that. It was interesting, but Lilly’s work was always in the back of my mind. When a position opened up, I joined the educational department at the Mystic Seaquarium in Connecticut. Later, I moved into the training program. I heard Oceanus had an opening for a trainer and came to Cape Cod.” She regarded me with interest. “First a quote from Euripides, then an ancient dolphin legend. You seem to be familiar with the classics.”

  “I should be, I studied them for a couple of years in college. It was my mother’s idea. She was afraid I might grow up to be like my grandfather Nikos, who knocked off half the occupying Turkish army in Crete. But the siren call of my Cretan genes was too strong. I quit college, joined the Marines to save democracy in Vietnam, escaped with my body in one piece and my mind a wreck, got a job as a Boston cop, got burned out, and moved to Cape Cod to fish.” I didn’t mention my private-detective work.

  “How did you hear there was an opening at Oceanus?” she asked.

  “The fishing boat I work on was laid up with engine problems. I was looking around for something to do while the boat was being fixed. I’ve about had it with the unreliability of fishing, anyhow. A friend who knows Austin called me and said there was some part-time dirty work available, but it might evolve into a real job if and when the park ever reopens. Any news on that?”

  Sally licked the salt off the edge of her glass with her tongue. “Dan keeps saying he’s going to reopen soon, but your guess is as good as mine, and mine isn’t very good. It’s all this business with Rocky. First Eddy’s death, then the boycott, the picketing, and particularly the bomb threat.”

  “What do you think? Did the whale kill Eddy?”

  “I don’t know. There’s some evidence it was possible, but . . . .”

  “But you don’t believe that’s what happened.”

  She pushed her drink aside. “Look, Soc. I’ve worked around marine mammals for five years. Mostly dolphins, I admit, but I spent some time helping with Rocky. And in my opinion, he’s one of the most gentle creatures I have ever met.”

  “That doesn’t cut it,” I said. “Just about every murderer you read about in the papers has got a neighbor who’ll say how nice he was and helped take out the rubbish. I knew a guy in Vietnam who was like Father Christmas to the local kids. He’d pick them up, hug them, give them candy. He had a couple back home he missed a lot. Then one day after some of his guys got hit in an enemy ambush, he went into a village and wiped out half a dozen families, kids, mothers, grandfathers. Machine-gunned
them first then threw in a couple of grenades. Funny part was, I think he really liked kids.”

  Sally looked up from her drink. Anger flared in her eyes. “Dolphins and orcas are a lot different from humans,” she said firmly. “They only kill for food.”

  A raw nerve. “I’m new at this,” I said, backing off. “Maybe I’ll learn.”

  I never found out if my tepid apology was accepted because Mike Arnold walked into the bar and came over to the table.

  “I saw your car outside,” he said to Sally, ignoring me. He didn’t expect to find his attractive dolphin trainer drinking with his newest and lowest slave.

  “Won’t you join us?” Sally asked.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled. “I’m meeting some people.” He glanced pointedly at me. “Bring your scuba gear when you come in tomorrow.” Then he went to the other side of the rectangular bar and sat directly across from us. I took a sip from my beer mug and glanced over the rim. Mike was staring at me with unfriendly eyes.

  “Am I doing something wrong having a drink with you?” I asked. “He looks as if he’s sorry the penguins didn’t eat me.”

  “Mike and I have been out a few times, that’s all.”

  I looked at the clock and drained my beer. The air was getting too tense to be productive. “I have to be on my way, but maybe we can get together again.”

  “I’d like that,” she said, and I think she meant it.

  We stood and shook hands. Sally took her drink and said she was going to stay to chat with Mike. I said I’d see her tomorrow at work. Minutes later, I was on Route 28, driving over the old concrete bridge that spans Bass River. People were fishing for flounder off the bridge. I let my eyes range downriver where the Mariah had been moored.

  Two dead men, Eddy Byron and Phil Hanley, equaled one inescapable conclusion I’d do well to keep in mind. Working for Oceanus can be hazardous to your health.