The Gray Drake

by Charles Cutter

  He woke up and propped himself against the cabin side. He ran his hand along the top of the gunwale in the cockpit—silky, varnished mahogany with four coats of Valspar. It would need a light sanding and another coat before the summer was over. He looked over at the teak deck, nicely oiled, which gave it a wet look, then past the tiller and the boom crutch to the harbor, now full of boats on their moorings. After Labor Day, they would all be put away until next year. In June, though, the harbor bustled with the boats owned by those with too much money and not enough sense.

  He turned to starboard and looked over at the tip of Harbor Point, to Cottage 59, a magnificent three-story Victorian cottage that fronted both Little Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan. It belonged to his Aunt Kitty, his only living relative save Zeke-the-Boy. He would inherit Cottage 59 at the unfortunate time of his aunt’s passing.

  “Zeke, the cottage is free and clear. We could borrow against it.” Zeke didn’t acknowledge his master. “But that might not be such a good idea.” Burr watched the patchy, cumulus clouds drift across the sky, turning the water from blue to black and back to blue as they passed overhead. Burr breathed in the lake air. It smelled like pines, sand and fish.

  “I never thought for a moment that Skinner would dismiss the murder charge. He would indict Mother Teresa for jaywalking. Now we’re going to have to figure out what to do,” he said to the snoring dog. He ran his hand along the gunwale again. “But not today.” He lay back down and pulled his hat over his eyes.

  Burr woke from a most pleasant second nap to the sound of Zeke barking.

  “Damn it all,” he said. “Now what?” He pushed the bill of his hat off his face and saw Zeke standing on the deck looking over the side and barking. Probably ducks looking for another handout. “Quiet.”

  Zeke looked over at Burr and gave him an urgent look. He turned his attention and his barking back to whatever it was that was so important.

  Burr lay there, then he heard what incensed Zeke. A knocking. It was a knock, knock, knock. Something or someone was rapping on Spindrift’s hull. Each time there was a knock, Zeke answered with a bark. Burr sat up.

  “Come over here,” said a voice.

  Burr stayed put. It didn’t sound like Jacob.

  “This instant.”

  Burr thought the voice over the side had no understanding that Burr, as master of Spindrift, was a law unto himself, at least as far as the confines of his new boat.

  “Come over here this minute.”

  Burr stayed put. The unwelcome visitor rapped. Zeke barked.

  At last he could take it no more. He stood up and peered over the port side at a man in a dinghy. “Are you the Fuller Brush man of the nautical world?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Or perhaps you’re selling the seafaring Encyclopedia Britannica.”

  “How dare you,” the man said.

  Burr took a closer look. Below him sat a severe-looking man in the most magnificent dinghy Burr had ever seen. Two-inch mahogany strips ran from a mahogany transom to a feathered bow covered with at least a dozen coats of varnish over a rich brown stain. He thought that dinghy probably cost more than Spindrift. If he was a salesman on the water, he was doing very well indeed.

  “That dinghy is a thing of beauty.” Now that Burr was fully engaged, Zeke stopped barking, his duty done.

  In a white polo, khaki shorts, and Harken sailing shoes, the severe but handsome man looked every bit as good as his dinghy. He was in his mid-fifties with a deep tan, including his forehead. He must not fish, Burr thought.

  “I am here for my money,” said the unhappy man.

  Just what I need, another creditor. The man, whoever he was, shipped his oars. Burr was sure he had never seen the man before, and he couldn’t fathom how he could possibly owe him any money.

  “I’m sure you’re at the wrong boat,” Burr said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I am rather busy.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course, I do,” Burr said. “You’re an annoying fellow in a very fine-looking dinghy.”

  “I am Aaron Carlson. Dr. Aaron Carlson, chief cardiologist at Munson Hospital in Traverse City.”

  “I’m not having any heart issues,” Burr said, still confounded, but the name had a familiar ring to it.

  “I am here for my money,” said the cardiologist.

  “A cardiologist,” Burr said. “Now I understand your attitude. You sit at the right hand of God.”

  Dr. Carlson pointed a long, manicured finger at Burr. “Spindrift was my boat, which you bought on a note, which is in default.”

  Burr looked astern at his dinghy, plywood, painted white with a firehose rub rail. He remembered how he knew Carlson’s name. He had bought Spindrift from a broker and had never met the owner. All he had done was sign a note. Burr was fairly certain he had overplayed his hand, especially the part about the Fuller Brush man.

  Burr scratched Zeke’s left ear, the ear he liked having scratched. Burr loved his new boat. In point of fact, Burr loved all boats. And women. And dogs.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Bring the note current and I’ll row back to shore. Let’s call it four thousand even. You may keep Spindrift as long as you stay current.”

  Burr disappeared down below. He fished out his wallet and took out a folded piece of paper. A long, blue Lafayette and Wertheim check. He filled in the past-due amount and signed his name with a flourish. Back on deck, he passed the check to the good doctor.

  “It is a felony to pass a bad check.”

  “It will clear,” Burr said.

  Dr. Carlson folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. He pushed off, turned the stern of his dinghy to Burr, and rowed away.

  Burr read the transom and laughed despite himself. Heartache.

  His nap ruined but still master of Spindrift, at least until the check bounced, Burr sat in the cockpit and scratched Zeke’s left ear again. The dog sighed. Burr’s favorite coffee mug read, “If dogs could purr, there would be no need for cats.”

  Burr caressed the satiny varnish on the gunwale again, then reached down and ran his fingers on the oiled teak cockpit sole. Then he looked up at the spindly mast, all forty-seven feet of it. Spindrift had more rigging than a clipper. He thought it would have been simpler to use a bigger tree for the mast.

  “Zeke, this is a fine mess.” He looked at his watch. “There’s only one thing to do.” He scurried down below and pried up one of the floorboards. There, where some of the ballast should have been, were three-dozen bottles of wine in all shapes and sizes, but mostly reds and mostly Bordeaux. Burr picked out his favorite. It was mostly Cabernet, but it had some Merlot and a pinch of Cabernet Franc. There was a little water in the bilge, but nothing to worry about, and it kept the wine nicely cooled. He replaced the floorboard and stepped forward to the galley.

  Spindrift was his first boat with a midships galley. She had an alcohol stove, an icebox, a food locker and one drawer. He rummaged through the drawer until he found the corkscrew. He uncorked the Bordeaux and took three steps back to the main salon. He sat down on the starboard bunk and waited for the wine to open. Zeke lounged on the port bunk. Burr smelled the boat smells: the mildew, the gas in the bilge, the varnish. He couldn’t wait a moment longer and poured himself a glass.

  Three glasses later, Burr lit the alcohol stove. He watched the blue flame and smelled the burning alcohol. The wind had shifted around to the southeast. Spindrift bounced up and down on her moorings, but the stove, mounted on gimbals, barely moved. He opened a can of baked beans, dumped them into a small pot and put them over the flame. He stirred the beans, Bush’s Original, then sliced two hog dogs, Koegel’s Viennas, over the pot. He lit the kerosene lamps in the main salon. They also swung on gimbals. He dropped down the table mounted on the mast and served himself a plateful of beans and franks. He poured himself an
other glass of wine.

  He scooped up a spoonful. “Zeke, I love a good Bordeaux with Bush’s and Koegel’s,” he said. “This is the life.” Except that, at the moment, it wasn’t. He drank from his wine glass.

  There was the small matter of the check. Burr passed Zeke a piece of the hot dog. “Be careful. It’s hot.” Zeke wolfed it down, either not noticing or not caring. Burr drained his glass.

  * * *

  At six the next morning, Zeke licked Burr on the cheek. He knew exactly what Zeke wanted, there being certain inconveniences to keeping company with a dog on a boat. Burr threw on his clothes and grabbed his canvas bag. He put on his Sperry rain gear and climbed into the dinghy, Zeke at his heels.

  A low had drifted in overnight and the rain had started at about two in the morning. Burr quite enjoyed sleeping while it rained, especially on a sailboat. The sound of the rain tapping on the cabin top soothed him, but Spindrift had her share of leaks, actually more than her share. No matter where he moved, the rain dripped on him.

  Burr rowed from midships. Zeke sat in the stern. As soon as Burr beached the dinghy, Zeke leapt over him and found the nearest tree. Burr put his soggy dog in the Jeep and showered in the boater’s head. He walked up the hill to Mary Ellen’s, an old-fashioned diner on Main Street and ordered the Mary Ellen: two eggs over easy, sausage, hash browns, toast, and coffee.

  More or less revived, but still a little foggy from the Bordeaux, he and Zeke set off for East Lansing.

  * * *

  Burr sat behind his desk in his leather chair. Zeke was curled up on the couch.

  Burr turned and looked out the window at downtown East Lansing. It was August, and the end of summer term at MSU. No traffic to speak of, and no one on foot.

  Burr swiveled back to his desk. He had put this off as long as he could. He had the accursed Lafayette and Wertheim checkbook in front of him. He started to open it, but thought better of it. Instead, he opened his top desk drawer and took out yet another No. 2 yellow pencil. He tapped it on his desk. He put the pencil down. “Here we go, Zeke.”

  Burr opened the checkbook and flipped through the stubs to the last check written. Consumers Power for seven hundred twenty-nine dollars and seventeen cents. How could it possibly cost so much to heat his building in the summer when the heat wasn’t even on. Thompson Shepherd had said he’d think about giving Burr a check. Burr hoped he wouldn’t think about it too long. Without some money from somewhere, the check he had written to Carlson would surely bounce.

  At that very moment, Eve walked in, Jacob at her heels.

  “What goes on with the checkbook?” Eve said.

  “Just making sure we’re still solvent.”

  “We may be liquid, but we haven’t been solvent for quite some time,” Eve said.

  The finer points of finance annoyed and confused Burr, who preferred to live by the how-can-I-be-out-of-money-if-I-have-checks philosophy. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the lists Wes had given him.

  Burr tapped the list with his pencil. “These are lists of everyone who was at the auction.”

  “The auction?” Eve said.

  Jacob picked an imaginary dog hair off his slacks. “At The Gray Drake. The night Quinn Shepherd was murdered.”

  “He may have been murdered, or it may have been an accident.” Burr tapped on one of the lists with his pencil. “These are the guests.” He tapped on another list. “This is the help, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, busboys, dishwashers, cooks.” He tapped on the third list. “And this is the string quartet. From what I’m told, they are quite accomplished.”

  “A string quartet?” Eve said.

  “They play the Four Seasons. All four movements,” Jacob said.

  “And here is a list of the guides,” Burr said.

  Eve leaned over the desk, turned the lists so they were facing her. “There must be two hundred names on these lists.”

  “I think it’s closer to three hundred,” Burr said.

  “It would take months to go through this list, and money,” Eve said.

  “We have to start somewhere,” Burr said.

  Jacob picked up the list of guides. He ran his finger down the list. “Here he is. Billy McDonough. He’s the oldest guide on the river. Knows everyone. I’d start with him.”

  Burr and Zeke walked down the stairs, past Michelangelo’s, the padlock still on the door, and outside to his Jeep. He pulled a parking ticket out from under the windshield wiper and crumpled it into a ball.

  * * *

  Just after five-thirty, Burr found Billy McDonough’s house, a small cabin with peeling gray siding. Burr knocked. No one answered. But there was a red Ford F-150 with rusted quarter panels parked in the driveway.

  They walked through the yard, mostly ferns, shaded by fifty-year-old oaks. Not a blade of grass in sight. He saw a boathouse that was bigger than the cabin. “That figures.” Burr knocked on the boathouse door. No one answered. He knocked again. Still no answer. He turned the knob and opened the door about a foot. It was dark inside, except for a light in the corner. The smell of the river seeped up and out the door, along with something else. What was it? Burr took a deep breath. Wood, the smell of wood. Wood shavings and sawdust. He stepped in and saw a light in the corner. “Anybody home?”

  A dog barked and ran at him and Zeke, its nails clicking on the concrete floor. The dog looked at him and then growled at Zeke. Never one to back down, Zeke growled back. The hair on his back stood on end.

  The dog, a bull of a German Shorthair, launched himself at Zeke. Zeke snapped at the shorthair. Burr grabbed Zeke by the collar.

  “What the devil is going on?” said a tall, thin man with a white ponytail. “Jake, no.”

  The shorthair backed off.

  “Jake, heel.” The dog moved to the left of the tall man and sat at his side.

  Zeke lunged at the pointer, but couldn’t shake free of Burr’s grip. “Stop it, Zeke.”

  “Get that dog out of here and take yourself with him.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McDonough,” Burr said. “You are Billy McDonough, aren’t you?”

  The man nodded. His white ponytail reached his shoulders and matched his mustache and his eyebrows. He had a lined, leathery face, and yellow teeth.

  “You better have a good reason for breaking in here like this.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McDonough. I knocked twice, but there was no answer.”

  “So you barged in?”

  “I saw a light in the corner.”

  “Sometimes I don’t hear anything when I’m working.”

  Zeke squirmed and tried to slip out of his collar.

  “You better get control of your dog.”

  Burr put Zeke in the Jeep and went back to the boathouse. Burr walked toward the light and found himself standing in a pile of lumber, wood shavings and sawdust. There was a table saw to his left, a lathe to his right. McDonough was at a workbench, sharpening a knife.

  “Don’t say anything until I finish this. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you’ve got something sharp in your hands, you better pay attention to it.”

  Burr stood behind McDonough and watched him slide the blade, all nine inches of it, back and forth along a sharpener. McDonough made it look like an art form. He finished sharpening and sheathed the knife.

  “Mr. McDonough, my name is Burr Lafayette, Elizabeth Shepherd’s lawyer.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Do you know anyone who might have had a reason to kill Quinn Shepherd?”

  McDonough looked up at Burr. “Other than Lizzie?”

  “Why would Lizzie kill Quinn?”

  “She had all the reason in the world—what with his cattin’ around and the drugs.”

  Burr kicked at a scrap of wood. “The drugs?”

  McDonough turned on the
overhead lights. To Burr’s left, the skeleton of an Au Sable riverboat sat on sawhorses. The boat’s naked ribs made it look like a dinosaur lying on its back.

  “He couldn’t live like that on a guide’s wages.” McDonough walked over to the frame and disappeared under the sawhorses.

  Burr crouched, so he could see McDonough. “I thought his family had money.”

  “Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. But that’s how I think Quinn made his money. Sellin’ drugs to the sports. There’s so much oil money around here now, they got nothin’ else to spend it on. Then there was that woman. So I’d say Lizzie just got tired of the whole thing.”

  “So you think it was drugs?” Burr said. “Drugs and women?” This is just what I need. “Could it have been an accident?”

  “No.” McDonough crawled away from Burr. “Quinn might have been a lot of things, but he was no fool on the water.”

  “What if he were drunk?” Burr said.

  “Drunk or sober, nobody could fish like him, and nobody was better on the river.”

  Burr was tired of looking at McDonough from behind. He walked around the soon-to-be-boat, so he could at least talk to the top of McDonough’s head.

  “I been building these boats for almost fifty years and floating the Au Sable longer.” McDonough looked up at Burr. “I been down every foot of the river, and I never seen anything like Quinn Shepherd.” He turned his back to the boat. “This is the only place in the world these boats are used. The loggers used them, and then somebody got the bright idea to use them for fishing.”

  Here we go again.

  “And the water where this boathouse sits is in the Holy Waters,” McDonough said.

  “The Holy Waters?”

  “Catch and release. DNR fought us over it. But we got it two years ago. Wes and his damned auction had a big part in it. I’m pretty sure he has his crippled-up hand in the cookie jar. Anyway, this is the place, and I’m here to fish it. And guard it.”