If the San Diego Yacht Club could successfully defend against New Zealand , Ambrose had ideas that he'd revealed to no one yet. Dazzling ideas. He dreamed of encouraging a challenge from a Baltic nation. He could envision challenges from Finland and Estonia, not to mention the Scandinavian countries. And Germany, of course. In 1992 Russia had made a try without sufficient resources behind it, and he had ideas that might persuade it to try again. He wanted to take the Cup to places it had never been, to drum up world interest. Airlines like SAS should commit to sponsorship. Participation in the Cup regatta would benefit each country's economy and lift the national pride. He hoped to convince them all.
Here in America people hadn't a clue. In Dallas, a customs officer checking them in from London had actually tried to make him take the Cup apart to search it for contraband! An American Airlines field representative had arrived on the scene to quell the ensuing disturbance. It was the closest Ambrose had ever come to engaging in physical violence. It had been an outrage.
Cynical San Diego Yacht Club members called the regatta a soap opera and gave it nicknames: "As the Anchor Drags" or "The Coma Off Point Loma." They despised Bill Koch, most of them, and many didn't even like Dennis Conner. "Ego, Fear and Greed" is the America's Cup motto, they liked to say.
Of course he knew the only reason they'd selected him as Keeper of the Cup was because nobody else had wanted it as badly as he had. And he was a local businessman, a man without a family who was willing to devote himself to it heart and soul. He had never been high in the yacht-club food chain, but he was safe and absolutely dependable. He didn't care anymore why he'd been chosen. All he knew was that the Cup was more alive to him than any human being he'd ever known.
Perhaps no one who hadn't been there could ever understand. You had to have been to the Isle of Wight, back with the Cup from whence it came. Back to visit the Royal Yacht Squadron, a quaint old club with a separate ladies' entrance and a members' room where no ladies were allowed. A club whose commodore' was usually knighted. On that trip the Cup had stayed in the wine cellar of the castle with, security provided by the British Armyand five thousand people had come to see the America's Cup!
The Cup had no memories? Ambrose Lutterworth thought it did. Yes, he'd anthropomorphized that silver trophy; of course he had. But as Keeper of the Cup, he was its sole protector. He was keeping it for another man, a man not yet alive, who would gaze at it a hundred years from now with as much love. Someone very like him, perhaps.
Ambrose had to reach into the breast pocket of his pinfeather jacket for the tomato-red silk handkerchief. He dabbed the tears furtively, but he needn't have worried. He was all alone in the room. Except for the America's Cup.
There was a group of young adults practicing self-defense on the beach in Crown Point that afternoon. Fortney had to stop the boat for Leeds because two of the girls wore damp T-shirts over bikini bottoms. Leeds had already worn panda grooves around his eyes watching a pair of honeymooners screwing their brains out on the fifth-floor balcony of the high-rise hotel in Quivira Basin.
"Alfred Hitchcock did movies about peepers like you," Fortney informed him. "And they all ended up in trouble."
"Look at the one in pink!" Leeds handed Fortney the glasses. "Legs all the way up to heaven!"
"To purgatory if your old lady ever gets wise to you," Fortney said?
"Wanna look for a while?"
"Naw, I'm sick of watching those mutant ninja guppies doing kung fu. Let's do something really different. Let's do some police work."
"Mellow out," Leeds said. "Open my bag and have some a my wife's tollhouse cookies."
"My first ex-wife made tollhouse cookies," Fortney informed him. "They could've killed a horse, especially if you chucked one at its head. That woman had no business in the kitchen. I hear she finally found something she can do. Runs around with a gang of geeks that throw chicken blood on abortion clinics. They better never let her cook the chicken, that's all I can say."
Leeds put down the binoculars and said, "Let's go."
"Now they're doing tai chi or something. No interesting muscle movement."
Fortney steered the patrol boat into Sail Bay, cruising along the shoreline, dodging all the boating bozos who had rented boats for the afternoon with no idea of what they were doing.
Fortney particularly liked the Mission Bay view of San Diego topography. Today the quixotic blue dome of the University of San Diego's Immaculata Church flashed Easter sunlight appropriately.
But after they nearly got broadsided by a particularly inept Catamaran Clifford in a rented cat with blue-striped sails, Leeds said, "These cretins're more dangerous than high-absorbency tampons. Let's boogie."
When they got safely back into Fiesta Bay, they saw an extraordinary sight. A rented motorboat had turtled and its sole occupant was clinging to the hull while two lifeguards struggled to get her into their rescue boat. She wore a white swimsuit with a purple orchid patternthe largest swimsuit either cop had ever seen in the aquatic park. The woman, about Fortney's age, weighed 350 pounds minimum. She was doing everything she could to help, but it was no use.
Fortney saw that it was the two surfer-dude lifeguards who'd dissed him after the sheik dumped him into Mission Bay. He turned about and motored away before the lifeguards spotted them.
The cops watched through binoculars at a safe distance while the lifeguards sweated and strained. One of them fell down in the boat, and Fortney snickered. The other pulled off his jacket and got in the cold water, trying to boost her up, and Leeds chortled.
Both cops grabbed for the binoculars when the swimming lifeguard actually got the woman's enormous bottom an inch or two out of the water. But when she dropped back in and floundered, the cops became hysterical, almost rolling on the deck. Fortney was holding his stomach, tears streaming down his face, Leeds could hardly catch his breath.
Finally the lifeguards decided to tow her. They put a surfboard in the water, rolled her onto it, and towed the half-submerged woman toward shore.
Fortney throttled forward, heading in the direction of the home dock they shared with the lifeguards. The cops had to loiter in the channel for ten minutes until the rescue boat arrived, apparently having put the woman safely ashore. Both lifeguards were standing by the wheel, exhausted.
Leeds drove up to the rescue boat while Fortney stood on the bow, doing his best imitation of his least-favorite evening-news anchor. Fortney held his waterproof flashlight like a microphone and in his most booming TV anchor voice yelled across the water: "Stalwart lifeguards rescue stranded whale in Mission Bay! Film at eleven!"
The older lifeguard cupped his hand over his ear and said, "What's that, dude? What'd you say?"
Fortney was only too happy to oblige. He superboomed the encore: "Courageous Mission Bay lifeguards rescue stranded whale in"
He stopped when she rose up over the gunnels of the rescue boat from where she had been lying on the deck. The whale!
"Oh, shit," Leeds muttered.
She glared at the cops, hanging onto the gunnels, spitting up bay water.
Fortney said to her, "Oh. I didn't see Oh. Well, hell, I got room to talk? Look at this load I'm carrying." And he patted his tummy, a frozen smile pasted to his crimson kisser.
While the lifeguards grinned their evil surfer grins, the younger one said, "Dudes, you are the most un-harmonious news anchors I've seen since Connie Chung worked with Dan Rather!"
"We just got a call!" Leeds cried. "Gotta go!"
He roared away so fast, their wake almost swamped the rescue boat. But the fat woman lying on the deck was too sick to care.
Ordinarily, with a dangerous murder suspect, they'd have asked SWAT to enter the little clapboard house in City Heights, a house occupied by a welfare recipient named Tamara Taylor. She was a former hooker who'd worked for Oliver Mantleberry one hundred pounds ago when she was young and childless but who now lived off the taxpayers of San Diego. Sometimes she received a bit of financial support from
Oliver Mantleberry, who, in a burst of paternal sentimentality, had decided to take one of the two bedrooms in the little house, claiming he wanted to be with the three children he'd given her.
But actually he wanted to be closer to his girls on the boulevard and "consolidate business." Which to him meant whipping the living shit out of any girl he caught holding out on him. One of those who'd been whupped-on one too many times had told Letch Boggs about the pimp's living arrangements. That was how Letch knew where to find Oliver Mantleberry.
In that it was Easter Sunday and the cops didn't want to waste any more time than they already had, SWAT was not included. Instead there were Anne Zorn, Sal Maldonado, the other two team members, Randy Bulstrom and Zeke Calhoun, their sergeant, Bill Bowden, two patrol units, and a K-9 unit.
Letch asked for a shotgun of his own, but the homicide sergeant said he preferred that patrol officers handle the shotguns whenever possible. Letch then requested that they turn the dog loose on Oliver Mantleberry for, oh, no more than twenty minutes before they bothered with handcuffs. The dog, Reggie, was a 100-pound German shepherd with a bite pressure that could shred training sleeves. The sergeant said he preferred to take prisoners with attached limbs whenever possible.
The moment they drove down the street the cops could hear kids playing. It was broad daylight on a pleasant Easter Sunday, so there were lots of cars and people around in this neighborhood of single-family residences. The only way to play it was to charge ,
They caravaned in and quickly unloaded in the street. One patrol unit and three detectives ran down each side of the house to the rear. The sergeant, Letch Boggs, Anne Zorn, and the K-9 unit went to the front.
Sergeant Bowden knocked and said, "Police officers! Open the door! Now!"
Ninety seconds later the little house was full of cops as well as a dog whose rumbling sounded like the Simba exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. Three kids under the age of six were crying their eyes out, and their momma sat on a kitchen chair not looking like she could ever have made much money on El Cajon Boulevard.
"This is my house!" she yelled. "You-ain't got no warrant!"
"But we do," Letch informed her. "A felony warrant for pimping and pandering." He failed to mention that the complainant would hot be appearing in court.
When she heard about the warrant for pimping, she stopped hollering. As an ex-hooker, she vaguely understood that pimping was a nonreducible felony that requires prison time. In the big joint, not the county jail. That quieted her down.
She also recognized Letch Boggs from the old days, that smelly, funky vice cop who made everybody's life miserable. She was afraid of him and said, "I ain't his momma. I don't know where he went to."
The homicide detectives were content to let Letch run the show and do the talking since his specialty was whores and pimps. Everybody knew he was good at what he did.
Letch said, "Tamara, I think you better not fuck with old Letch over this one. We wanna talk about something much bigger than a pimping case."
She looked at him suspiciously and said, "What is it you wanna talk about?"
"Murder," Letch said. "We wanna talk to him about murder."
She showed genuine astonishment. "What? Who?"
"A human being, that's what," Letch said. "Named Dawn Coyote, that's who."
"Don't know anyone with that name," Tamara Taylor said.
"I don't care if you do or don't," Letch said, "but you lie to us and you better get the kids all packed up for a ride. And you can forget about the chocolate bunnies and jelly beans."
"I ain't done nothin'!" she cried. "You can't hassle me on no humbug murder charge!"
"Watch us," he said. "You're lying to us now so that puts you in it."
Tamara Taylor's youngest came crawling over just then. His diaper was soaked and he started bawling, reaching up to his mother. She picked up the child and tried to hush him.
"This ain't right!" Tarnara said. "You know I don't know nothin' about no murder! This ain't right, what you're doin'."
"Life jist ain't fair," Letch said. "Ask Dawn Coyote."
As if on cue, the dog started rumbling louder, and the K-9 cop jerked the choker and took the beast outside.
Then Tamara said, "He came home and packed up some of his things and left."
"What time did he come home?" Anne asked.
" 'Bout five o'clock this mornin'. I wasn't really awake very much."
"Where'd he go?" Sal Maldonado asked.
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe L.A."
"Why's everybody in San Diego leaving town to run to L.A.?" Letch asked rhetorically.
"Can't go south," Tamara pointed out. "Bunch a fuckin' Mexicans down that way." Then she looked at Sal Maldonado and said, "But I ain't got nothin' against 'em, you understand."
"Where in L.A.?" Anne asked.
"You think that man tells me where he goes?" Tamara asked. "All he ever give me is these three kids and enough money to pay the light bill once in a while. You think he tells me what he does in his life? Shit, you don't know Oliver Mantleberry, you think that."
When Sal Maldonado pulled open the drawer of the bedroom dresser, Tamara said, "He's taller than that."
"Where's his clothes?" Anne Zorn asked. "The clothes he wore when he came home this morning?"
"I don't know," she said. "I heard him change. But he didn't leave the soiled ones for me like he usually do. Musta took 'em with him. Maybe he found some other woman stupid enough to do his washin' and ironin'."
"Where'd he change clothes? In your bedroom?" Anne asked.
"In the bathroom," she said.
"You don't mind if I have a look in there, do you?"
"Anythin' you find in that bathroom you kin have," Tamara said.
Anne disappeared into the bathroom for a moment and returned grinning at Sal Maldonado. She said to Tamara, "Have you had an accident lately? Where you bled?"
"No."
"You having your period?"
"No."
"Any of the kids have an accident?"
"No."
"How'd your washcloth get like this?" Anne held up a damp grayish washcloth by the corner. There were wine-dark stains on it.
"Where'd that come from?" Tamara asked.
"The bathtub," Anne said. "Somebody dropped it in the tub."
"Not me," Tamara said. "That's my washrag, but I didn't use it."
"I believe you," Anne Zorn said.
"What's on that washrag?" Tamara Taylor wanted to know.
"The genetic signature," Letch Boggs said, "of a girl named Jane Kelly. The story of her whole life is written right there on that old washcloth."
CHAPTER TEN
FOR TWO DAYS AFTER THE TERROR ON EASTER SUNDAY, BLAZE Duvall left her Shelter Island hotel room only to visit one of the fast-food joints on Rosecrans. She avoided the hotel dining room, never used the hotel's gym equipment, and didn't go jogging on the island even though she needed a workout. She settled for a daily swim in the hotel pool but only after dark.
On the second night she awoke screaming. In her dream she'd seen a dark shape rising. A mask of indefinable menace leaped at her, howling, teeth bared. In the dream she was trapped in a sinister web of gold chain, like the terrible chains Dawn had worn.
On Wednesday morning, Blaze got up refreshed, having had her first dreamless sleep since checking in. The isolation had enabled her to examine every detail of her plans, and her fear was subsiding. If everything went the way it should, she'd soon have the fifteen thousand plus the five hundred finder's fee from Simon Cooke. The thought forced a smile, her first in three days.
If it didn't go according to plan, if anything went wrong, she had other ideas. She needed money, and soon, to reestablish herself away from cops and away from Oliver Mantleberry. Blaze had important phone calls to make.
She called Simon Cooke at the boatyard, telling his boss that she was Simon's sister and could he please come to the phone for an important message?
When Simon pic
ked up, she. said, "Simon, this is your sister, Blaze. Don't say my name if you're not alone."
"Hi!" he said. "I been calling your number for two days."
"Don't say any more than you have to. I'm calling to make sure you're ready to go tomorrow."
"I'm ready," he said.
"I'm just checking to make sure nothing's changed."
"Okay. Nothing's changed."
"Be ready to go to work tomorrow with whatever you think you'll need in the way of tools. Tonight I'll be doing my job. Tomorrow you'll do yours ."
"Where'll you be tonight?"
"Wherever our friend is."
"Kin I see you later maybe?"
"After tomorrow we'll have plenty of time to see each other, okay?"
"Okay," Simon said.
Blaze hung up, pleasantly surprised that he hadn't slipped and blabbed her name. Maybe he wasn't quite as stupid as she thought.
She dialed the home number of Ambrose Lutterworth, and when he answered she said, "My lucky day. I was afraid you'd be at work."
"I thought you'd be checking in with me every day," he said. "I've called your number, but I just keep getting that damned machine."
"I've been out of town. Family emergency. I'm back now."
"Is everything"
"From my end it's a go. All I'll need from you is the medication." .
"Where shall we meet?"
"I'll drop by your house at seven o'clock. And, Ambrose, I hope you understand that all payments must be made at the close of business tomorrow. By then you'll have proof that all parties have performed."
"Of course, I expected that. Cash, as agreed. I've already moved the funds. I'll withdraw them this afternoon."
"Fine," Blaze said;
"And then we're going to have that romantic dinner, aren't we?"
"Why not?" Blaze said. "There'll be a lot to celebrate."
Wambaugh, Joseph - Floaters Page 16