She said that a dog could not be expected to hold his pee that long, and she wasn't going to risk his hurting his kidneys by making him do it.
In that case, Letch said, he'd have to take the matter into his own hands. She asked him what that meant and Letch answered that he didn't know, but maybe a dognapper'd throw the little bastard into a billa-bongwhatever that waslike the poor old swagman in "Waltzing Matilda."
She answered by threatening to call the police.
That's when Letch devised the scheme to pee on the tree and drive the little bowwow bonkers.
It worked like magic the first time he tried it. Letch got home very late after his Saturday shift, choked down three glasses of water, and crept outside,, making just enough noise on the walkway for the terrier to come to the window.
Then Letch whipped out his willie and started to pee on the tree, right through the chain-link fence, lighting up the scene with the beam from his pencil flashlight so the Scottie couldn't miss it.
The dog went ballistic. He barked and clawed the window and whined. Letch shut it off prematurely and tiptoed back inside the apartment to drink more water and wait.
Presently he heard the doggy-door flap open when she raised the slider to let the terrier out. Of course the pooch padded down the steps heading straight for the tree to pee over Letch's.
After the Scottie went back inside, Letch sidled outside and whistled just loud enough for canine ears. When the pooch looked out, Letch headed for the tree and turned on the beam and the stream.
This time the terrier howled like a wolf. Letch sneaked into the laundry room by the back porch and heard the Aussie open the door and yell, "Bloody hell, Nigell This is the last time!"
The frantic terrier scuttled down the steps, made a beeline for the tree, hardly paused to sniff, and peed over Letch's. Three minutes after the anxious dog scampered back inside, Letch did it again. A few squirts was all he could muster this time, but Nigel peeked out the window and made a terrible ruckus. Music to a weary vice cop's ears.
Last night was the third in a row that he'd tormented the compulsive terrier. Letch figured another night or two and the babe would pay the kids across the street to adopt the stressed-out pooch. But Letch was dog-tired himself from all the night prowling. Not to mention all the stops and starts that weren't helping his bladder or his prostate.
Just then, Dawn Coyote emerged from a doorway on the second floor of the apartment complex and Letch trained his binoculars on the door before it dosed. It was nearly obscured by molded shadows, but he caught a glimpse of the number 2 A on the door and made a mental note.
When Dawn got back behind the wheel of Oliver Mantleberry's white Jaguar, Letch followed her at a safe distance to her place of business, a corner on El Cajon Boulevard. Under a streetlight. Like every whore for a hundred years.
While Blaze was rummaging through her crowded closet trying to find something pink for fashion-challenged number eight, she was the subject of a telephone call from number sixty-three.
That telephone call, like all the calls regarding Blaze Duvall, had a life of its own. First the caller would reach a number at an answering service that never picked up. The call would be forwarded after one ring to a seventy-two-year-old former hooker called Serenity Jones, who at one time had had twenty girls working for her before she got busted and sentenced to six months in jail for pandering. Now Serenity Jones contracted with just three girls, who did outcall massages at $200 a visit Whatever they got over and above that was their business, as long as Serenity got her forty-percent commission on the standard fee. Serenity never tried to chisel her girls and wouldn't stand for it in return.
Nevertheless, Blaze and the other two masseuses would occasionally burn the old madam. When they had a regular client they could trust, they'd sometimes suggest he call a different number listed to a close friend of the masseuse's. That way the masseuse could keep the whole tariff and Serenity would be none the wiser.
Blaze liked Serenity, and she especially liked the first-class clients Serenity sent her way, so she was careful not to cheat the old babe too often. Blaze's pal for the occasional beat-the-madam call was Dawn Coyote, who maintained a separate phone line and answering machine bought and paid for by Blaze Duvall. She also paid Dawn $200 a month for the service.
When Serenity took the call from number sixty-three, she was sprawled in her leather recliner with a Siamese cat on her lap. Dribbles of ice cream splattered her flowered muumuu and the cat licked them from time to time. Serenity's platinum hair was in rollers, but even in the daytime she wore a trowel load of eye shadow, and her crimson acrylic nails were long enough for spearfishing.
Serenity knew from personal experience that without scanner the cops would have a hard time tracing her if she used a mobile cellular phone. Even so, when she got a suspicious call on her cell phone she was always prepared to say adios and move on down the road to another apartment. People in her business couldn't get sentimental about hearth and home
That afternoon Serenity was really getting into the panel they had on her favorite trash talk show. Five transsexuals, the smallest of whom weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds, were telling the audience how it was easier to be a fat babe than a fat dude. Serenity, got annoyed when the cell phone rang, but she hit the mute button out her TV remote and answered.
While Blaze Duvall was still trying to figure out how the hell to be pretty in pink, a male voice said to Serenity, "This is number sixty-three. Please tell the lovely redhead that I'd like to see her tomorrow night. Eight-thirty. Same place as last time. Same room number."
Serenity said, "Okay, doll, that's fab. Any special instructions?"
The male voice said, "Warm. I'd like it warm this time."
"Fab, doll," Serenity said, hanging up and pressing the mute button just in time to hear the TV host ask one of the transsexuals whether she ever missed her penis. And what did she think when sick persons asked her if she'd pickled and jarred it as a memento?
Serenity tossed the tabby off her tummy and waddled to the fridge for another dish of cookies'n fudge ice cream, wondering how she'd ever coped with life before the freak shows. After she plopped back down in the recliner, she dialed a number, reaching Blaze's voice mail.
Blaze never picked up, but she listened to Serenity say, "Hello, darling. Number sixty-three would like to see your good self tomorrow evening. Eight-thirty. Same place as last time. And, oh yeah, he wants it warm this time. Bye, darling doll."
After looking as good as she could in a horrible pink turtleneck and tight blue jeans, Blaze wrote on a notepad beside the answering machine, "Icy Hot. 63."
She was very glad to hear from number sixty-three. It'd been three months, yet he'd always been a reliable bimonthly client at $200 per. And he'd give her at least a $20 tip if she used any imagination at all.
"Wants it warm" referred to his fetish for Icy Hot or Ben-Gay, cream used to heat up strained muscles and sports injuries. When she'd first started in the business, Blaze made the mistake of accidentally smearing a gob on a client's balls. The John came up off the bed like a Harrier jet and she never made that mistake again.
When she'd told Serenity about the accident, the old pro had just given her a dimpled smile and said, "Stay away from Petey and the twins with that stuff. The Johns can get that at the ballpark."
"Get what?" Blaze had wanted to know. Serenity had sung a little learning jingle to her novice masseuse: "Hot nuts! Red-hot nuts! They can get 'um from the pea-nut maaaan!"
CHAPTER TWO
DAY FELL ON A SATURDAY, AND THE KEEPER OF the Cup was delighted to turn on his TV without fear of encountering the O. J. Simpson legal circus. The trial was especially unfortunate for the America's Cup regatta because TV coverage would draw away attention from the defender and challenger finals that were set to begin on April 10 and 11, televised live on ESPN.
The Keeper of the Cup sat on the rear deck of his hillside house in Point Loma, drinking his morning coff
ee and enjoying an unobstructed view of San Diego harbor and a white-water view of Coronado. After his sister died he had become the sole heir to his widowed mother's estate, which consisted only of the nondescript sixty-five-year-old house with a leaky roof and termites galore.
But because of the glorious view the place was worth at least $1,250,000, His realtor colleagues thought the land might fetch even more without the ramshackle house on it, but he was one of the few local real estate agents with faith that the California housing market would rebound. He was determined to live in the house until it happened, or until termites brought it down on his head, which was possible.
The property, his mother had liked to remind him, would provide enough money to see him comfortably through old agebecause, in her words, he'd never provided adequately for himself. He was, after all, not even a broker, only an agent She'd never tired of reminding him that he had been destined for mediocrity from the moment he'd dropped out of college;. That was a reckless decision his father had never gotten over, or so his mother had needed to reiterate most of his life.
Long before her death at age eighty-five, he'd given up defending himself against her belittling and her unfavorable comparisons to his sister Sheila's unbearably aggressive husband, Bradley, a big-bucks plastic surgeon. The fact is, his tear ducts hadn't been overworked by the passing of either of the two women in his life. It was no wonder he'd never married, what with a lifetime of trying to outswim those man-eaters.
He considered pouring himself another cup of coffee, hoping the morning overcast would soon burn off. Everyone talked about how the wet winter had seemed endless this year and how it might affect the unpredictable seas off San, Diego and the America's Cup regatta.
Then he thought maybe he should go to the office, weekend or not. There'd been quite a bit of walk-in tourist action at the local real-estate offices during the America's Cup challenger trials. Hopefully there'd be a tot more when the finals got under way, but of course most of the tourists were looky-loos. Still, you never knew. People who followed yacht racing didn't need food stamps. In fact, one of his real-estate competitors had sold a $1350,000 Sunset Cliffs oceanfront home to a walk-in client that very week. You couldn't predict the out-of-town sailing crowd.
There was a big article in the paper that morning about the New Zealand challenger, and as he looked at the headline, it brought a cold lump to his gut, like a bag of wet sand. The New Zealanders were more than good. And their two boats? Seagoing rockets. He hated to even think of the Cup going to Auckland next month.
Everyone said that if the Cup left the San Diego Yacht Club it'd never return, not in his lifetime, perhaps not in the Cup's lifetime. Nobody was going to mount another $65 million campaign under the aegis of the San Diego Yacht Club as Kansas millionaire Bill Koch had done successfully in the Cup regatta of 1992. Since then the blustering Koch felt that he had been badly treated by the yacht club and had made his Views all too public. The Keeper of the Cup had to agree that if it went, it would never be won back by a San Diego challenger.
He glanced at the time: 9:10. His Omega Speedmaster gold chronograph reminded him of where it had come froman Omega company executive had given it to him when he'd accompanied the Cup to the Barcelona Boat Show.
He and the Cup had gone to Spain twice, to Paris three times, and to Monaco, where he'd stood in a receiving line and met Prince Rainier himself. He'd been to England four times, and to Ireland, where the enthusiasm was wonderful.
He'd traveled with it to Hong Kong, and to Tokyo, where the Japanese went wild over it. He'd taken it to Sydney and Toronto and Bern. He and the Cup had gone to one hundred American cities during the seven and a half years since Dennis Conner and his boat, Stars and Strifes , had won it back from the Aussies at Fremantle.
What a time that was. A DC-10 was almost filled with only America's Cup rooters when it landed back in San Diego on a Saturday afternoon. A parade of convertible cars was hastily formed and were driven with the Cup and the conquerors from the airport to the Broadway Pier, then back to the plane and on to New York to meet Ronald Reagan and two thousand yachting enthusiasts. The Keeper of the Cup nostalgically recalled it all: the pipers, the bands, the yacht club commodores, all waiting for them in New York.
And he resented the yachting world for criticizing San Diego's handling of the Cup. From 1851 to 1983 the Keepers of the Cup at the New York Yacht Club had never shown the Cup to anybody, yet the San Diego Yacht Club had shown it to the world. And he, an unpaid volunteer, just a dedicated club member, had lovingly protected that baroque twenty-seven-inch chunk of silver everywhere it wentand it had gone somewhere five hundred and thirty times in seven and a half years!
And if the Kiwi challengers were successful? If he thought too much about losing the Cup forever, he believed he might weepthis man who'd not wept when he lost a father, a sister, and a mother, all within the brief span of years since he'd been named Keeper of the Cup.
Even his mother had held her tongue and stopped her invidious comparisons after he'd returned from his second trip to England in May 1991. It was the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Garrard, the Crown jewelers, whose silversmiths had fashioned the original cup from one hundred antique pieces of silver. Queen Victoria had ordered three of the "hundred, guinea cups" from Garrard in 1851, but only the one remained.
Margaret Thatcher had made a wonderful speech that day as she stood on the Garrard staircase. She spoke without notes and he'd gotten to shake her hand afterward. His mother, a diehard Anglophile who'd never missed an episode of Masterpiece Theatre , had peppered him with questions, and he'd said yes, it's true that Denis Thatcher is very sweet but horribly henpecked. And that Denis (they were on a first-name basis, of course) had invited him to come over for the Chelsea flower show.
Actually, he'd never met Mrs. Thatcher's husband, but for once his mother had been forced to shut her mouth. For once, he had been more than mediocre.
And the Cup never traveled as baggage. When it was packed in its protective crate, it weighed, along with its cart, one hundred and fifty pounds, and it rode beside him either in a first-class seat or in business class whenever they traveled abroad. The San Diego Yacht Club charged the requesting entity a fee of $1,000 a day, plus $125 a day for the Keeper of the Cup, plus airfare and per diem. Jaded international airline pilots who saw celebrities every day would actually leave the cockpit to come and chat with him and often asked to have their photos taken with the America's Cup.
The truth was, the rest of the sailing world was far more impressed than were citizens of the United States with this, the oldest sporting trophy on the planet. To them it represented history and tradition, things America had devalued. And it represented money, both oldtypified by the New York Yacht Clubas well as new typified by an upstart millionaire like Bill Koch and the irrepressible seagoing hustler, Dennis Conner.
When the Keeper of the Cup rose to clear the breakfast dishes from the patio table, he was overwhelmingly sad and depressed. But later while shaving he got a churning in his gut. Not a wave exactly, more like an electric current. He was strangely anxious, almost frightened. His face felt hot. Flickers of an idea bombarded him.
He willed the amorphous images back into a corner of his mind and began shaving more deliberately, busying himself with routine. He hadn't liked that current.
Concentrating on his well-boned but weather-lined face, he thought his brother-in-law might be able to do something about the wattles under his chin. But his eyelids? He wondered if laser surgery was all it was cracked up to be. He was pretty sure Bradley wouldn't give him a dime's worth of discount. Bradley was resentful that as Sheila's widowed husband, he and their two grown children hadn't gotten a share, in her mother's house, even though Bradley's net worth was ten times greater than the value of the ramshackle family home in Point Loma.
Then he paused to examine his pale hair, more the color of taffy than the silver he preferred. A yacht club dermatologist had told him that it would st
op receding, but it hadn't. The photos of himself covering the wall of his bedroom proved it. A picture of him showing the Cup to King Juan Carlos of Spain. Next to that a photo of him shaking hands with King Harald of Norway. Another with former King Constantine of Greece. And one of his favorites, when he definitely had more hair than now, with Princess Anne at the Royal Thames Yacht Club. She had been surprised that he was not the commodore of the San Diego Yacht Club, but he had informed Her Highness that the commodore was not fond of travel and that he, in a way, had a more exalted titleKeeper of the Cup. Then he felt: fear! He tried to trim his neat graying mustache, but his hands began trembling. He put down the scissors, went into his mothers old sewing room, now his study, and rummaged through folders of America's Cup clippings and other material he'd collected. When he found what he was looking for he stopped breathing for a moment: a photo of the French boat after it had been dropped to the ground, its keel protruding right through the deck.
It was like a slam of thunder over Point Loma. The fully formed idea surged like a wave crashing over him, washing away fear, leaving excitement roiling in its wake.
The lifeguards were cop wannabes who'd been given limited police powers in Mission Bay. That is, they could write tickets in their rescue boat, and they could help control the armada of boaters swarming the bay on weekends and holidays. The police officers who manned the Harbor Unit of the San Diego Police Department tolerated lifeguard antics, except on those occasions when an overzealous, unarmed lifeguard might opt to front-off some three-hundred-pound tweaker in a dirtbag boat he put into the water only about twice a year. In fact, a tweaker's bay cruiser was more or less a floating pickup truckwith more water leaks and less gas mileage-that he could drive with his mitts full of beer cans. To brake, a tweaker just ran into another boat.
Wambaugh, Joseph - Floaters Page 2