Death in Deep Water

by Paul Kemprecos

  Uncle Constantine was near the wreck, kneeling on the bottom as if in prayer, his arms curled in front of him in a fetal position. I swam over and stuck my face a few inches from his helmet and looked in the front porthole. His features were contorted in a mask of pain, his eyes scrunched tight. I rapped with my knuckles on the helmet and his eyes snapped open. He raised his arm and pointed above his head. I looked up, saw nothing but the hose and safety line snaking toward the surface, so I rose a few yards and discovered the problem.

  The lifeline was tangled in the jagged bow of the old wreck. Uncle Constantine could blow his suit up until he looked like a float from the Macy’s parade, but he was going nowhere with the line tightly snagged. I wondered why he hadn’t cut it. His knife was still in its sheath. I whipped out my blade, severed the line and dove down to where my uncle was. The rest should have been easy, but I was having problems of my own.

  First came a light-headed feeling, as if my skull were a helium balloon. Then a headache that made me dizzy. Waves of nausea swept through me. I could taste the bile in my mouth that presaged a fit of vomiting. It is not a good idea to throw up underwater, because you can choke. I fought down the lump rising in my throat, grabbed Uncle Constantine by the sleeve, and pointed toward the surface.

  He was still clutching his chest, but he understood what I wanted, and let his suit inflate. He began to rise, rapidly, and I held on for the ride. We popped up thirty feet from the Artemis. Still fighting the stomach-churning nausea, I swam to the boat with Uncle Constantine in tow. I grabbed the edge of the staging, pulled myself up, and unbuckled my tank harness and weight belt. Then with me pulling on his suit, Uncle Constantine ponderously climbed into the boat and sank to the deck. Quickly, I unscrewed the helmet. He was as white as a haddock’s belly. After a few gulps of fresh air, his cheeks regained color, but his face was still crumpled in agony.

  “The pills, Aristotle,” he whispered hoarsely. “The pills, below, in the first-aid kit.”

  Yanking the fins off my feet, I practically fell down the companionway into the galley and ripped the first-aid kit off the bulkhead. Buried in with the Band-Aids and antiseptic salve was a plastic prescription vial. I dashed back onto the deck and spilled the pills onto my hand. Uncle Constantine reached out and took two of them, chewing the tablets down without any water. He closed his eyes. For a moment I thought he was gone, but soon he began to breathe more regularly.

  He reached out for my hand and gripped it tightly. “Epharisto, Aristotle,” he said hoarsely, “epharisto. Thank you, nephew.”

  I squeezed back. Then I let go and staggered to the rail, leaned over, and spilled my guts into the sea.

  Chapter 23

  I gave a final dry heave over the side, wiped the spittle from my chin, and came back to check on Uncle Constantine. His face had an unhealthy pallor, but the pills had done their work. He was grumbling like a nascent volcano. I helped him out of his suit, then peeled off mine. Hooking our arms together for support, we went below and collapsed, exhausted, into the bunks.

  After a short while, Uncle Constantine groaned. I tensed, thinking he was going to have another seizure.

  Instead, he rolled out of his bunk, came over, and put his face six inches from mine. His brow was crinkled in worry. “You okay, Aristotle?”

  I said, “I’m fine, Uncle.”

  He sighed with obvious relief. “Good. Anything happens to you, your mother kill me.”

  Something was wrong. I was supposed to be worried about him. I sat up. “How about you, Uncle? How do you feel?”

  He thumped his chest with his knuckles. “Tough as a barnacle, Aristotle.”

  “Naw, Uncle, you’re tougher. What happened down there?”

  He sat on his bunk and snorted. “Everything fine. I go down, walk around, find the ship. You get my signal?”

  I nodded.

  “So, I want to see tin. I climb up onto the ship. Still everything okay. Then pains come. I can’t breathe. I try to get off ship, fall. Lifeline gets tangled.”

  “Why didn’t you cut the line?”

  “I can’t move. Too much pain, here.” He touched his chest.

  “What were those pills you took?”

  “Nothing, Aristotle.” He dismissed my question with a wave of his hand. “Just something makes me feel better.”

  I worked as a street cop long enough to know a heart attack when I see one. The pills were probably nitroglycerin. My uncle’s heart problems were news to me. I was out of the family loop and usually learned a relative was ill when I went to his funeral. My mother runs a better intelligence service than the CIA. If a cousin sneezes in Athens, Ma is on the phone within five minutes with a prescription. She would have known about my uncle. That’s why she sounded so worried.

  I leveled my eyes at him. “I don’t believe you, Uncle Constantine. That wasn’t nothing down there.”

  He flashed his teeth in a devilish smile and slapped my knee. “We feel better after some medicine.” He opened a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of ouzo, and poured the colorless liquid to the tops of two mugs. A licorice smell filled the cabin.

  Uncle Constantine picked his cup up in a toast. “Yasou,” he said.

  I shook my head, and clinked my mug against his. “Yasou, Uncle.”

  The ouzo was damn good medicine. The sweet liquid fire trickled down my throat, washed away the brassy taste in my mouth, and helped clear my head. I couldn’t figure it. I felt fine in the moments before I dived. The nausea came on after I went to my air tank. Now, except for some residual dizziness, I felt pretty good again.

  We finished our ouzo therapy and went on deck. Uncle Constantine took care of his dive suit and I tried an experiment. Taking the regulator from my tank, I stuck it in my mouth and breathed. Nothing happened at first, but after a few minutes I felt light-headed and a slight pressure began to press on my brain. I yanked the regulator from my mouth and gulped in fresh air. Soon I felt fine again. The problem was in my air tank. If I had gone down for a normal, prolonged dive, I could have been in trouble. To test my theory, I switched tanks and tried the same procedure. There was no problem with the spare tank. It didn’t make sense. Both tanks had been filled at the dive shop at the same time. If one were fouled by a faulty air compressor, then the other one would be contaminated, too.

  Uncle Constantine came over and saw me fiddling with the tanks.

  “Everything okay?”

  “No, Uncle. Something was wrong with my air supply.”

  He rapped a tank with his knuckles. “I told you. Too dangerous. You want to know about tin?”

  I had forgotten about the old wreck. “Of course! Did you find it?”

  “You bet,” he said, beaming. “Wooden deck all rotted out, so I see many ingots in the hold. They just lie there, Aristotle. We get a basket down and a winch. Pull them up in no time, tomorrow.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know about tomorrow. We’ll have to talk about it.”

  He looked disappointed, but only for a second. “Okay, we talk about it, then we go dive.” He squeezed my shoulder and went back to tend to his gear.

  The Artemis came into Lewis Bay around midafternoon. After we secured her, I told Uncle Constantine I was going to be busy the next day or two, but I promised to dive with him again as soon as I possibly could. He wasn’t happy at the delay, but he understood.

  I put my gear in the pickup and drove to Larry’s Dive Shop. Larry was out with a dive club, but the kid in the shop said he was due back any minute. I leaned against my truck and before long a van piled into the parking lot and squeaked to a stop. The doors flew open and a half-dozen excited young men and women piled out. The compact red-haired man who was driving the van saw me and turned the group over to an assistant, then came over and shook my hand.

  “Socko, my man. Just got back from a club dive off Monomoy. Let’s go inside and have a brew.�
�� We went into the shop and he led the way to a cubbyhole at the back. The space was cluttered with tanks, spears, fins, and other dive paraphernalia. Larry liberated a six-pack of Rolling Rock from a tiny refrigerator and popped a couple of cans.

  He took a noisy slurp of foam. “Glad to see you, dude.”

  “You might not be so glad when you heard what happened today.” I told him about my aborted dive with Uncle Constantine. “I had the tanks filled here. Any chance your compressor’s on the blink?”

  “Shit no,” he said with a shake of his head. “Impossible. I filled my tanks the same time I did yours and I didn’t have any problems today. ’Sides, didn’t you say only one was bad?”

  “That’s right, the other tank was fine. So what gives?”

  He pondered a moment. “There was something in the tank besides air, I’d guess. It didn’t kill you. Just made you sick. Could have been pure oxygen. But taking a guess, I’d say you were breathing in carbon dioxide.”

  “Carbon dioxide? How the hell would CO2 get into one of my tanks?”

  “That’s the hard part. I don’t know.”

  The bad tank was out of my sight a couple of hours yesterday in the locker room at Oceanus. My buoyancy compensator was clearly stenciled with my last name. Someone could have taken the tank, let some air out, and substituted carbon dioxide. I wouldn’t have been the wiser until I dived.

  My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Larry was looking at me expectantly.

  “Got any ideas?” he said.

  “Maybe. Is there any way you can test what’s in this tank so I can know for sure?”

  “I can give it a try, Soc. Meantime, you can take a fresh tank from the storage shed in case you plan on making a dive.”

  “Thanks, Larry,” I said. “I might just do that.”

  From Larry’s, I drove to the boathouse. I gave Kojak a handful of Whisker Lickin’s to curb his appetite, then popped a Bud and went out on the sun deck. I flopped in a deck chair and stared out at the blue waters of the bay. Twice since joining the Oceanus staff I had run into trouble, first in the shark tank, then on the wreck dive. One time could have been an accident, but not two. I went back into the boathouse and called the number of the Boston police lab.

  “Hey, Soc,” Charlie Reed said, “I tried you earlier today, but you were out. I got a reading on the stuff you sent up.”

  “That’s what I’m calling about. Anything exciting?”

  Charlie chuckled. “Was that some kind of test to see if I had lost my touch?”

  “I don’t get you, Charlie.”

  “That powder you sent me.” He chuckled again. “It was fish blood.”

  “Fish blood?”

  “That’s right. Dried fish blood, crystallized and very highly concentrated, I’d say.”

  I was back in the shark tank, dead eyes and sharp white teeth whirling around me, Whitey and his friends nudging me with their noses. Sharks can smell the blood of a speared fish for miles. In the close confines of the shark tank, they would have picked up the dried fish blood in my pocket in no time.

  “You still there?” Charlie was saying.

  “Yeah, just thinking. Anything else?”

  “Nope. If you give me a couple of weeks, I might be able to track down the species.”

  “Thanks, Charlie, but don’t bother. I think I know the species.”

  I hung up and stared into space. My air tank could have been contaminated by accident, but the dried fish blood did not get in my pockets by itself. Somebody put it there. A weight nudged my ankle and I looked down. Kojak had finished his appetizer and wanted the main course.

  After feeding Kojak, I called Sam. His depression had vanished. The head mechanic showed up as promised. He labored all day on the engine and promised to have it ready the next morning. I asked Sam to put the Nickerson kid on standby in case I was too busy to go fishing, and said I’d get back to him later that week. Then I called my mother.

  “Hi, Ma. It’s me,” I said. “I’ve seen Uncle Constantine twice. He’s fine.”

  If she was surprised at my call, she didn’t show it. My mother definitely had class.

  “Ah,” she said, obviously relieved.

  “I was wondering, though.” I didn’t want to alarm her by describing my uncle’s heart attack, so I slid into it through the backdoor. “Is there something you didn’t tell me about Uncle Constantine’s health? I saw him taking some pills and I wondered what they were for.”

  “Yes, Aristotle, I don’t want you to worry, but Constantine has a heart attack after your aunt Thalia dies. He becomes very sick, but he gets well again. He is very strong, not as strong as he thinks. Does he still want to go under the water?”

  “Yes. But not for a few days.”

  “He is much too stubborn. Always the same, when he is a young man he leaves Crete and goes off to Kalymnos to find sponges.” She sighed impatiently. “Before you go out on the boat, you have your uncle call me. I want to talk to him.”

  “I’ll do my best, Ma.”

  “I know you will, Aristotle. Now I have to go now and cook some food for Papa. Remember to call me. Bye.”

  With my family duty temporarily out of the way and Sam put on hold, I could get back to detecting. Tonight’s assignment was dinner with Sally Carlin. A tough job, but somebody had to do it. I dug a clean pair of tan chinos out of the closet and found an aqua short-sleeved shirt I’d only worn once or twice. Then I stood under the shower and let the hot water wash the salt accumulation off my skin.

  I lounged around in my cutoffs and read the Boston Globe. The Red Sox were still in first place, I noted with the relief that only a Sox fan can feel. I looked at the clock. Time to go. I got dressed, slipped a pair of Top-Siders over bare feet, told Kojak not to wait up for me, and went outside where my chariot awaited. On the way to Sally’s I stopped off at a liquor store and picked up a good Riesling.

  It was nearly sunset when I parked outside the carriage house. Sally greeted me at the door with a kiss. She was wearing a white cotton short-sleeved jersey with a scoop neck, a pair of loose-fitting cinnamon slacks, and leather sandals. Her hair was tied about halfway down its length. She seemed to flow rather than walk across the room, trailing a light flower scent I liked but couldn’t identify. She wore gold earrings. Somehow it didn’t surprise me to see they were made in the shape of dolphins.

  The table was next to the French-door screens. A bayberry candle in a crystal holder had been placed in front of each setting. I asked if she needed help.

  “You can open the wine if you’d like,” she said, handing me a corkscrew. “Dinner’s about done. I hope you like chicken Florentine.” She opened the stove door and a mouth-watering fragrance filled the kitchen.

  “I hated spinach as a kid, but the second they started calling it Florentine my whole attitude changed.”

  She closed the oven. “Good. I’m the same way. I would hide the spinach under my mashed potatoes, but my mother always caught me. Did you ever wonder why it was okay with your mother to leave the vegetables you liked, but you had to eat the ones you hated?”

  “I gave up trying to figure out my mother a long time ago.”

  I popped the cork from the wine and poured it into two slender goblets on the table, then lit the bayberry candles. Sally turned the lights down, put some Mozart on the stereo, and brought out a wooden bowl with a salad made from red lettuce, fresh garden tomatoes, cucumbers, black olives, and a honey-mustard dressing. The Riesling was sweet and not too dry. Halfway through the salads, she got up and came back with a platter of boned chicken breasts and a covered bowl of wild rice.

  Private investigators are probably below used-car salesman and just above a pimp on the socioeconomic scale, but the job has its advantages. I was having a candlelight dinner with a beautiful woman. And when I got tired of looking at her, which was highly un
likely, I could let my gaze drift through the French doors and out to Cape Cod Bay. It was low tide and the chocolaty mud flats extended nearly a mile out into the water, broken into purple ribbons by elongated tidal pools. The orange sun sank into the bay, leaving behind a pearly light.

  We made small talk about the weather and traffic, as comfortable with each other as a couple of old friends. I discovered Sally was not only beautiful, she was a good cook.

  “That was delicious,” I said, resisting the urge to lick my plate.

  “Good, I’m glad you enjoyed it.” She cleared the table and returned with two snifters of brandy. We sipped from the snifters, enjoying the slightly full feeling that comes with a good dinner.

  After a minute, she set her glass down. “I’ve been thinking.” My antennae perked up. When a woman says she’s been thinking, she really means it. “About our talk the other night. You asked about Rocky, if he would have attacked someone who punished him.”

  “I remember. You didn’t answer my question.”

  She brushed a stray hair back from her forehead. “I guess it’s no secret how I feel about this whole thing,” she said. “It devastates me that some people think Rocky is a murderer. Rocky and the dolphins at Oceanus are more than just clever animals who can do tricks. They’re intelligent, but they are feeling creatures. They’re very much aware of their environment. They’re very much aware of us. They know they could hurt us if they want to, but they don’t. I’ve felt right along Rocky didn’t kill Eddy, but after our talk the other night, I’m not so sure.”

  “I didn’t mean to distress you.”

  “No, Soc. You did me a favor. It’s really made me think about this. In answer to your question, yes, I think Rocky could have been goaded into an attack. I’m still convinced that Rocky is innocent. I know him. He’s far too gentle to have hurt anyone. But what I don’t know is how he’d react under high stress, if a human had been hurting him, whether his natural reflexes would just take over.”