Death in Deep Water

by Paul Kemprecos

  “Okay, you drive hard bargain, but we do it your way.”

  Oscar the penguin saw me coming and gave me the bad eye as only a penguin can.

  I leaned over the fence and he moved to the edge of his perch, his beak pointed at the sky, his stubby wings slightly raised, as if poised for flight.

  “Look, pal,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea to chase you all over hell and give you that shot.” I tossed him a fish. He gobbled it down, but he didn’t turn his back on me.

  “You know, Oscar, you’ve got a lot of hostility in you for a penguin.” That did it. He dove into the water and shot across the pool to the other side. I threw a handful of fish goodies over the fence and walked away with the squawks of a full-blown food fight ringing in my ears. I walked over to the dolphin pool. Froggy the white beluga came over to greet me. He stuck his funny clown’s head out of the water. I knelt down to pat his head and gave him a fish.

  “Hey, Froggy, you’re one of the locals. What’s really been going on at this crazy place?”

  He moved his head back and forth and said wonk.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I thought so.”

  I heard voices. Sally and Mike Arnold were approaching. I stood up and went over to meet them.

  “Mike,” I said. “Am I glad to see you. Look, I threw my back out unloading fish this morning, so I’ve got to leave a little early to see a chiropractor.”

  The smile on his face faded and his mouth curled in a skeptical frown. He must have been thinking three is a crowd because he told me to buzz off. Sally said she hoped my back would get better soon, but she avoided eye contact. I punched out and jotted down Jill’s address from her time card. Minutes later I headed out of the parking lot. My back had fully recovered. Like the old song says. Miracles do happen.

  I drove along Route 28 until I found a pay phone. I tried calling Jill. The phone rang a dozen times. No answer.

  From there, I drove to the neat Cape Cod house Phil Hanley used to live in before he died. I reviewed what I knew about Hanley. He was dead. Somebody had killed him. He might have been killed to shut him up. And his wife might know what it was that he knew. Which could put her in a dangerous position.

  I left the truck, went up the walk, and rang the bell. The door was answered by a dark-haired boy about six years old. His nose was runny and his large eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying. There was a fresh Band-Aid on his knee. He was nibbling soggy bites out of a chocolate-chip cookie that was bigger than his head.

  He looked at me curiously. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I answered. “Is your mommy home?”

  The kid opened his mouth to answer, but he was whisked back into the house and Mrs. Hanley stepped into the doorway to take his place. She looked as if she had just seen her kid talking to Bruno Hauptmann. There was fear in her face, fear of me. She stood there like a mother lion defending her cub.

  “Do you remember me, Mrs. Hanley? My name is Socarides.”

  “Yes, you’re the private detective,” she said guardedly. “What do you want?”

  “May I talk to you a few minutes?”

  “What about?”

  “Your husband.”

  She bit her lip. “I’m not interested in talking to you. Now go, please, before I call the police.”

  The boy pulled on my shirt. “I fell off my trike and hurt my knee, want to see it?”

  “Sure, tiger.” I squatted and looked at the ugly bruise around the edge of the Band-Aid. “You’re a brave boy not to cry.”

  “My daddy said it was all right for boys to cry if they got hurt.”

  “Your daddy was right. Even big boys like me can cry when they get hurt.”

  He nodded gravely. “Did you know my daddy?”

  I stood up. Mrs. Hanley’s eyes pleaded for me to go.

  “A little,” I said. “He was very nice.”

  The boy’s mother said, “Go in the kitchen and get another cookie while I talk to the man.”

  He shot into the house and we were alone. I knew I was putting her through an ordeal just by being there. The last time I showed up on her doorstep, her husband was dead within hours. But I kept pushing because I didn’t want her to end up the same way.

  “Look, Mrs. Hanley,” I said, “I’m very sorry about what happened to your husband. But I just need to ask a few questions. It could be very important. All I’m asking is five minutes. So do us both a favor before you slam the door in my face. Please call the state-police barracks and ask for Captain Parmenter. He’ll vouch for me. I don’t know the number. It’s in the phone book under Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then said, “Go around back and sit on the deck. I’ll meet you there.”

  She closed the door and I walked out to the deck and sat in a lounge chair. The deck overlooked a small backyard and a split-rail fence that divided the property from the backyard of another house. On the other side of the fence an old man and woman crawled along on their hands and knees, working a vegetable garden.

  Before long the deck sliders swished open and Mrs. Hanley came out. She was carrying a plastic pitcher and two glasses.

  She sat down in the other chair and studied me. “Captain Parmenter said you were harmless. That you only got irritable when you couldn’t get a beer. I don’t have any beer. Will iced tea do?”

  “It’s fine. Did he tell you anything else about me?”

  She poured a glass of dark liquid and offered it to me. “Yes, that you almost married his daughter. I’m very sorry about what happened.”

  “So am I.”

  We were on more or less an even plane now. We had both lost somebody we loved.

  “I’ve sent Bobby in for a short nap. We can talk now.”

  “He’s a neat kid.”

  “Thank you. He really misses his father; they were pals. So he’s attracted to any grown-up male.”

  The tea had fresh mint the way I like it. Mrs. Hanley had aged since I last saw her. Sooty semicircles underlined her eyes. Her face was puffy from lack of sleep. It was the look of a woman in mourning.

  “I’m not here to cause you any more pain, Mrs. Hanley. I’m trying to find out who murdered your husband.”

  She shook her head. “I just can’t fathom who would want to hurt Phil. He had no enemies. He liked everybody, and they liked him. That was why he was so good at his job.”

  “He seemed bitter at being fired.”

  She bristled visibly. “Of course he was bitter. He was fired for telling the truth!”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Phil was responsible for dealing with the press. He was honest with them, answering all the reporters’ questions. So Austin fired him.”

  “I’ve heard the same story, Mrs. Hanley. It doesn’t strike me as the kind of knowledge that would get a man killed. Is there more?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  I waited.

  She arranged her thoughts, then said, “You have to understand something. My husband was an alcoholic. His drinking was the reason our marriage fell apart. It got even worse after he was fired from Oceanus. He went totally off the edge. Hitting bottom is the best thing that can happen to an alcoholic, Mr. Socarides. We were able to get him into intervention with a counselor, and into a detox program. He’d been pulling himself together. He went into AA. He hadn’t had a drink in months. There was a good chance he and I would get back together.”

  “Breaking up must have been very difficult.”

  “Yes, it was, but pushing for a separation was for his sake as well as mine. You see, I was always picking up after Phil, making his alcoholism easy. But the person most responsible for saving Phil was Steve. Phil met him in AA. He became Phil’s sponsor, the one he called when the urge to drink came back. They became quite close. Phil told me he and Steve had ta
lked about Oceanus, but he never told me what they discussed.”

  “What was Steve’s last name?”

  She smiled. “It’s Alcoholics Anonymous, Mr. Socarides.”

  “Of course. Where did Phil attend AA meetings, Mrs. Hanley?”

  “It’s the one in Orleans, at the Episcopal church. Phil was embarrassed at first, he didn’t want anyone he knew seeing him at an AA meeting, so he didn’t go to the one in our town.”

  “That’s a good lead, Mrs. Hanley.” I got up to leave. “I won’t bother you any longer. Thanks for the time and the tea.”

  “He really loved it, you know?”

  “Loved what, Mrs. Hanley?”

  “His boat, the Mariah. He told me that living close to the water, smelling the sea, and hearing the cry of the terns helped clear his head, made him see how he was destroying himself.”

  “I know exactly what he meant, Mrs. Hanley.”

  The sliders opened and the boy came out. He went over to his mother and gave her a hug. “I couldn’t nap,” he said.

  “That’s all right. Go over and see Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Maybe they’ll let you help in their garden.” Without another word, the boy ran across the lawn to the split-rail fence. The faces on the old couple lit up. They helped him through the fence and handed him a rake. Mrs. Hanley was watching her son. “It’s all so maddening,” she said. “Phil was coming back, we were going to pick up where we left off. We could have rebuilt our lives.”

  “You can still have a life, Mrs. Hanley. Your boy needs you.”

  “Yes,” she said. She turned to me, her eyes blazing and tearful at the same time, and I thought she was angry at me for being too quick with a platitude.

  “Get him,” she whispered. “Please, Mr. Socarides.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Get whoever took my son’s father away from him.”

  She extended her hand to grip mine tightly, and we held on to each other in a silent pact.

  Chapter 26

  Jill lived ten miles west of Hyannis in a two-story square-built captain’s house surrounded by a privet hedge that looked as if it had been cut with a nail clipper. I drove onto a semicircular gravel driveway edged with blue-blossomed explosions of hydrangea and looked out over West Bay. Dusk had fallen, and the hues of sea and sky flowed into each other like errant strokes from the brush of a careless watercolorist. I watched the rays of the setting sun go from pink to purple until a pulpy blackness oozed in and covered everything like a slow-moving tidal wave of blackstrap molasses. Then I got out of the truck.

  With a flashlight in hand, I went up the walk and punched the front doorbell. The Big Ben chimes echoed in the silent caverns of the old house. I pressed my ear against the door to shut out the night chorus of insects, hoping to hear the sound of footsteps. Inside there was only silence.

  I walked over to the garage and peeked through the window. The Mercedes inside must have belonged to Jill’s parents, who were in the south of France, but there was no sign of her battered Volvo. Playing the flashlight beam ahead of me, I followed a flagstone path around to the back of the house. A narrow border of impatiens and dusty miller ran alongside the foundation. I stopped at one point where some of the pink and white flowers were crushed by a waffled imprint in the soft earth.

  Boot prints led to a window and another set pointed away. Some tracks were scuffed as if a hurried attempt had been made to cover them. I put my sneaker into a footprint. It was about the same size as mine, a ten, definitely not that of the petite Jill. I flicked the light up at the window. Crumbs of dirt lay on the sill and dark paint showed where the white paint had been chipped off by a jimmy. I tried the window. It was unlocked.

  The window slid open easily. I slithered inside and seconds later stood in a large living room listening to the monotonous tick-tack of a grandfather’s clock. Hooding my flashlight beam with my fingers, I moved through a dining room into the kitchen and explored the rest of the first floor, then climbed the stairs to the second story. There were three bedrooms, but only one showed signs of having been recently occupied. The four-poster bed was unmade and the dresser had a brush with long strands of blond hair in the bristles. I found some postcards from France addressed to Jill, but nothing that might tell me where she was.

  I sat on her bed, gathering my thoughts, hoping some object in the room might tell me a story. Nothing came to me. After a few minutes I went back downstairs and slipped out through the window I used to get in. I figured the person or persons who’d broken in before me had gone. I snapped the light off and moved quietly around to the side of the house on the way back to my pickup.

  A shadow detached itself from the shelter of a rosebush and stood in front of me, blocking the way. From behind came a rustle not much louder than a snake sliding through the grass. A muscular arm wrapped itself around my face and yanked my head back. The cold, hard sharpness of a knife blade pressed against my exposed Adam’s apple.

  A classic commando move, done as nicely as I’d ever seen. With this maneuver, you could take a sentry out and the only noise he’d made would be a bloody gurgle. I froze like a kid in a game of statues. My heart rate tripled. I didn’t dare breathe. A couple of eternities went by. The knife stayed where it was. I was still alive, but the chances of dying in my sleep had taken on long odds. Even worse, a mosquito was trying to drill a hole through my nose.

  The shadow in front of me had a voice.

  “I’d advise you not to move, Soc. Ned has a steady hand, but he’ll get nervous if you struggle.”

  I said, “Ig nargh movag.”

  Another figure came in from the left. Hands lightly patted up and down my body.

  “He’s clean,” a woman said.

  “Thank you, Sara. All right, Ned, you can let him go. Please don’t try anything foolish, Soc. We don’t want to hurt you, but we will if we have to.”

  The arm released me. I had no intention of doing anything foolish because Ned’s big knife had moved from my throat to the small of my back, where the point pricked the skin covering my kidneys.

  I said, “I thought the Sentinels were nonviolent, Walden.”

  The shadow took a few steps forward.

  “We are. As I told you, we’re basically opposed to violence. But it’s all relative, you know, if you think of us as surgeons removing cancers. To the body, a mugger’s knife or a doctor’s scalpel are both violent intrusions, but one cut is meant to harm and the other to help.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for hairsplitting. “Tell Ned that if he doesn’t take the shiv out of my back, I’ll revoke his license to practice medicine and stuff it down his throat.”

  Schiller laughed. “I don’t think so. Ned used to be a Green Beret. You can relax, Ned, our friend here isn’t going anywhere.”

  The knife was removed from my back. I could still feel the dimple from the sharp point. I swatted the mosquito and brushed him off my nose.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Excuse me for being unfriendly, Walden. I have an attitude about guys who sneak up and stick a knife under my chin.”

  “Ned is just using the skills he was taught by the Establishment. So tell me, what were you doing skulking around Jill’s house?”

  “What were you doing breaking into it?”

  “Hear that, gang? I told you we did a lousy job covering our tracks. I asked you first, Soc, but since you’ve been so gracious about the confusion a few minutes ago, I’ll answer your question. We were looking for Jill.”

  “What a coincidence, Walden, I was doing the same thing. Jill and I were supposed to meet this morning. She had something important to show me. When she didn’t come into work, I began to worry. I found out where she lived and tried to call her. There was no answer, so I came out here. I was hoping I’d find something.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah, Walden, I found you.”

 
“Do you know what Jill wanted to show you?”

  “No,” I said. “Wouldn’t she have told you?”

  “We were supposed to meet here last night. Jill was going to tell us what she had. She was pretty excited. But she never arrived, and she hasn’t called. We’ve been watching the house. You were right to worry. We think something happened to her.”

  “Like what?”

  “She said she was on the verge of something big, but she wanted to get the proof together and present it as a package.”

  “What are your plans now?”

  “We’ll sift through the information we have. Maybe there’s something there to point the way.”

  “I know this is a radical idea, but did you ever think of reporting her disappearance to the police?”

  “We don’t work with the Establishment,” he snarled. It was the same transformation from elf to troll that I had seen the first time I talked to him. “Besides, we think Jill could be hurt if the police go blundering into something they know nothing about.”

  “Okay, Walden if that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll keep poking around. Maybe I’ll turn up something.”

  “Good, but you’d better be a little more careful than you were tonight. The next people who jump out of the bushes at you might not be so friendly.”

  He stepped back. It was a signal for the others to leave. They melted into the darkness, following Schiller around the front of the house, their boots crunching into the gravel driveway. A few minutes later came the distant sound of a motor winding through the gears.

  I stood there listening to the buzz of insects, and for the first time I noticed that my T-shirt was soaked with sweat.

  I stopped at the boathouse to change clothes and gave Kojak a quick tummy scratch on the way out. Fifteen minutes later, I was looking for a parking space outside the Episcopal church.

  The young guy tending the coffeepot by the door leading into the church basement gave me a wide grin and stuck out his mitt.

  “Hi,” he said “I’m the official greeter tonight. My name is Ed.”