by Betty Webb
Remembering poor Lucy in her small holding pen, I fought back the urge to gag. “Yes, I have.”
He looked me up and down, the dingo eyeing its prey. “How about tonight?”
Needing time to steel myself for what promised to be an unpleasant encounter, I shook my head. “I’m busy until Thursday. Or we can wait for the weekend.”
Disappointment clouded his face but he rallied. “Thursday it is. Might I suggest Jacqueline’s?”
Jacqueline’s was a small French bistro in downtown San Sebastian known for its excellent food, but we’d probably run into too many acquaintances, maybe even Joe, who was addicted to their white cocolate mousse. I countered with a less popular restaurant.
“Why don’t we try Zone Nine? I hear their steaks are delicious.” Zone Nine, on the outskirts of Carmel, was an obnoxiously minimalist eatery where more attention was paid to the food’s presentation than its taste. But its greater distance from the zoo suited my purposes.
He beamed. “Then it’s a date! What time should I pick you up? You live at Gunn Landing Harbor, don’t you?”
I didn’t want him anywhere near my beloved Merilee. “Why don’t I meet you there at eight?” That way I wouldn’t have to sit next to him in his car, where he might be tempted to paw at me.
“Eight it is, Teddy. Zone Nine.”
I pulled my hand away and wiped it surreptitiously on my dress. “I can hardly wait.”
Oh, I was going to Hell, no doubt about it.
***
On my way home I stopped off at my mother’s house to borrow some jewelry for the big date. I also wanted to find out why she hadn’t been at the fund-raiser. She turned out to be no more amenable to my questions than Dr. Kate.
Not only that, but her lipstick was smeared all over her face. She couldn’t seem to get me out of the house soon enough, either, claiming that she needed to clean the silver (an obvious lie, since Maid-of-the-Week did that), had to go grocery shopping (another lie; Maid-of-the-Week did that, too), and needed to trim the topiary on the front lawn (yet another lie, since Caro had never trimmed a bush in her life. Mr. Gonzales, her combination gardener/handyman, took care of those honors).
As she nudged me toward the door, I asked, “What’s going on?” Not for the first time I grew concerned about the side effects of her La Jolla Strawberry/Carrot Diet. Protein deprivation could do strange things to the human brain, hence the ditzy behavior of so many supermodels. “Caro, what have you eaten today?”
She scowled. “More carrots than I can count. Don’t you have a dog to walk?”
“I left work a few minutes early so his bladder should be fine.” I made a mental note to keep a close eye on my mother’s condition during the next several days. Dieting was one thing, anorexia another. “Where’s the maid? I didn’t see her when I came in. And I couldn’t help but notice that the house isn’t up to standard.” Newspapers littered the sofas and a cat-sized dust bunny lurked under the Georgian armoire. Under ordinary circumstances, Caro would fire a maid for such obvious dereliction of duty.
“I gave her the week off.”
“Didn’t you hire her less than a month ago?”
“She needed some rest. It was nice of you to drop by, dear, but I have things to do.” She opened the door and hip-bumped me gently onto the porch.
“But Caro...”
She closed the door in my face and locked it.
Remembering the other reason I stopped by, banged loudly on the door. “Mother!”
The door opened, but only by an inch. All I could see were a few manicured fingernails and the tip of her surgery-sculpted nose. “Don’t make a scene. And stop calling me ‘Mother.’”
“But I need to borrow something!”
The door opened slightly wider. Now I could see a mascaraed eye. It was smudged, too. “What?”
“That diamond necklace Petersen gave you, the four-carat job.” I hadn’t cared for her last husband, a heart surgeon who seemingly lacked one himself, but he’d been generous with her.
“Hang on.” The door closed and I heard the lock turn again. After a few minutes the lock slid back, the door opened, and she thrust a crumpled paper bag through the narrow opening. “Bye.”
The door slammed shut.
Wondering if, like other lepers, I should ring a bell in front of me as I drove through the village, I hurried home, changed into some sweats, and snapped the leash onto DJ Bonz’s collar.
“Guess nobody loves me but you, dog.”
As it turned out, Bonz wasn’t interested in me, either. He was more obsessed with a filaree bush than in keeping me company, so I let him do his business. By the time his bladder emptied and we returned to the Merilee, what little good humor I’d had was long gone.
At loose ends, I sat on deck hoping that Maureen, my favorite harbor otter, might swim by for a handout. But she was a no-show.
Other than the occasional bleating of the foghorn on Gunn Point and the shush-shush of waves against the Merilee, the evening was silent. Most of my neighbors were members of the Harbor Liveaboard Committee, and had gathered at the restaurant portion of Fred’s Fish Market to hash through the new ordinance codes recently issued by the harbor master. I’d meant to attend the meeting but what with one thing and another, had let it slide.
Too depressed to watch the spectacular sunset, I went below deck and clicked on my tiny television set. The reception was poor, but at least I was able to listen to the bottom-of-the-hour local news. The news reader—I think he had gray hair, although I couldn’t tell for sure due to all the snow on the screen—gave an update on the virus suspected in so many sea otter deaths.
This made me switch my concerns to the Maureen. Could she be sick? Was that why she hadn’t showed?
The news reader segued to the results of a kayak race in Santa Cruz. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “The recent murder of Grayson Harrill, husband of one of the Gunn heirs, has curtailed attempts to break the famous Trust.” He launched into an account of the monies involved, parroting the information Roarke had given me. “In connection with the murder, Zorah Vega, the Gunn Zoo’s head keeper, was booked the other day into San Sebastian County Jail, then released on bond. None of this has affected the day-to-day running of the zoo, administrators tell us. Although the murder did take place on its grounds, the zoo—for years the delight of adults and children alike—remains open.”
The camera shifted away from him to a blurry file video of some large animal—I think it was a orangutan—romping through some spotty green stuff that vaguely resembled our Great Apes enclosure. The camera switched to a shot of a birdlike creature flapping around in what appeared to be an aviary. From the multiplicity of sounds the bird made, I concluded it was Carlos, my magpie jay would-be lover.
“Sweet-sweet!” I called to the TV.
“Boom-boom!” the TV bird called back. At least somebody was still talking to me.
Our dialogue ended when Miss Priss jumped on the counter and began pawing at the television screen. Almost as if responding to her attack, Carlos vanished, to be replaced by another talking head, this one a human female, reading the weather report.
“In the Coastal cities, fog in the morning, burning off by early afternoon. Clear inland, temperatures rising to eighty in the valleys.”
I turned off the TV and picked up a copy of the latest Jack Hanna book I’d borrowed from the San Sebastian Public Library, but before I finished the first page, I felt, rather than heard, footsteps on deck. The Merilee rolled slightly to port, accommodating the added weight. Bonz pricked up his ears but didn’t bark.
“Who’s there?” I called.
The person had not requested permission to come aboard, as polite sailors always do, so I felt a faint stab of worry. Especially since my mother’s diamond necklace lay unprotected on the galley counter.
When the person didn’t answer, I raised my voice. “I said, ‘Who’s there?’ ”
No answer. Just stealthy footsteps approaching t
he open salon hatch. Alarmed, I grabbed a heavy flashlight from the shelf behind me, wishing it were something more lethal. After all, there was a murderer on the loose.
“Identify yourself!”
The footsteps continued until they stopped outside the hatch, where the light spilling from the salon revealed the tip of a shoe. Big. Broad. Rubber-soled.
A man’s.
My mouth went dry. If the intruder was a burglar, or something worse, what kind of defense could a three-legged dog and a half-blind cat mount on my behalf?
I’d have to save myself.
There was no place to run, no place to hide. As Bonz continued staring at the salon door, I snatched up my cell to call 9-1-1, but stopped before punching in the first numeral. What would I tell the dispatcher? That someone was standing on my boat and wouldn’t identify himself?
It sounded silly, even to me.
I could call Joe, but he lived fifteen miles away in San Sebastian, and by the time he drove down to the harbor, whatever was going to happen would have already happened. I could simply scream my head off, but such behavior would earn eternal contempt from the liveaboard community if my visitor turne out to be a tipsy neighbor who’d stumbled onto the wrong boat.
All those choices being unsatisfactory, I grabbed the bag containing the necklace in one hand, my flashlight in the other, and tiptoed into the aft cabin. Wishing I hadn’t left the nightstand light on, I ducked behind the entryway where a shivering Bonz immediately joined me. Tucking the necklace under a pillow, I raised the flashlight and gave it a few practice swings. Due to the heavy lifting I performed every day at the zoo, my arm muscles were well-developed, so with a little luck I could knock the intruder unconscious, then flee.
The Merilee rolled again as the man stepped into the salon. Maybe he would take my cheap TV set and leave. But I knew better. A mere thief would target a glitzy sloop like the Tequila Sunrise instead of my shabby, de-commissioned fishing boat, so my intruder had to be after something else. Probably not Caro’s necklace, because other than her, no one else knew I’d borrowed it.
There was another possibility; the intruder was after me personally. Since Zorah’s arrest I’d asked a lot of questions and maybe Grayson’s killer had decided to shut me up.
My entire body began to tremble.
Fear was acceptable, cowardice wasn’t, so I forced my hands to stop shaking. If the intruder was Grayson’s killer, I would fight back and get as much of his DNA on me as possible between my teeth and under my nails. He might take me out, but I’d take a piece of him with me.
A tall shadow fell across the cabin carpet.
I raised my flashlight to bring down on the intruder’s head.
As if suspecting someone waited for him, the intruder paused at the threshold.
I held my breath.
Come on, come on. Let’s get this over with.
He entered the cabin.
The nightstand light illuminated the intruder’s face, revealing black hair, a neatly-trimmed black beard, bushy black eyebrows—and green eyes fringed by red eyelashes very much out of sync with all that black hair.
I exhaled in relief.
“Hi, Dad.”
Chapter Ten
“I hardly recognized you with that beard and terrible dye job.” I poured Dad a glass of Riesling, and settled next to him on the salon’s settee. “You’re lucky I didn’t bash your head in.”
“So that’s why you were holding that flashlight up so high.” He took a sip of the wine, made a face. “Jesus, this is cheap stuff.”
“It’s all I can afford.”
“Sorry about that.”
I gave him a look. “I’ll bet.”
“We are what we are, Teddy. Besides, you know that I set up a bank account for you in the Caymans. Still not using it?”
“For charitable purposes only.” Like bailing friends out of jail.
“Aren’t you the self-righteous one.”
Since there was no point in discussing ethics with my ethics-challenged father, I changed the subject. “Let me take a wild guess here. You’ve been hiding out at Caro’s.”
He pushed his wine glass away. “Off and on. I arrived in town a week ago but your mother was having one of her awful parties, so I drove up to Santa Cruz and stayed on Al’s sloop.”
Albert Mazer. The friend who’d kept the Merilee for me. It didn’t surprise me that he would lend aid and comfort to my fugitive father, nor that Caro had, too. Her other marriages aside, he’d been the only man she’d ever truly loved.
“This isn’t the best time for you to pay a visit. There’s been a murder here and the authorities are, shall we say, acting hyper-vigilant.”
He nodded sagely. “The unfortunate murderee being Jeanette Gunn’s husband. When you say ‘the authorities,’ I take it you mean the sheriff.”
Annoyed, I grabbed the Riesling he so disdained and gulped it down. “Yes. Him. Anyway, everyone’s nervous around here, so while I’m always glad to see you, you’d be better off in a country that doesn’t have a tight extradition agreement with the U.S.”
“Such as Iran? North Korea?”
“Why not go back to Costa Rica? That’s worked fine so far.”
“It’s too hot for me there right now, and I’m not talking about Global Warming.”
I almost spit up my wine. “Don’t tell me you pulled another of your scams down there!”
You’d think that when my father absconded with his firm’s millions he’d be set for life, but no. After a few years on the relatively legal lam he missed his larcenous ways and began delving into various schemes to relieve the financially unwary of their superfluous money. The only good thing about all this was that he never ran scams on the less-than-filthy-rich, so the poor widows and orphans of the world were safe.
“Dad, I asked you a question.”
He flashed a sheepish grin. “That was a statement, not a question. If you must know, there was this young man at the El Presidente Casino in San Jose...”
It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t talking about nearby San Jose, California, but San Jose, Costa Rica, and the casino we sometimes visited with him during one of my infrequent trips to Central America.
“...and he was flashing around such a big roll of cash that I knew it would eventually give him back problems, so I just kind of helped him out. Played proactive chiropractor, you might say. I told him I could get my hands on some perfectly executed counterfeit twenties for about three cents on the dollar, a bargain rate...”
“I don’t need the details. What was your haul?”
“Less than two hundred thou. Mere pocket change.”
With people like my father, it’s not the money but the game, the adrenaline rush. This was why, with off-shore bank accounts totaling in the millions, he continued to rob, cheat, and steal as if he was one crust of bread away from starvation.
“If it were mere pocket change, what are you doing back here in Gunn Landing? You know the feds haven’t given up.”
“And I admire their persistence. But that’s why I grew the beard and gave myself the dye job you are so critical of.”
“You could at least have used some black mascara. Those red eyelashes are a dead giveaway.”
“Not a problem, since I always wear sunglasses when I’m out and about.”
Suspecting that I’d need it, I poured myself more cheap wine. “As much as I love discussing cosmetics with you, I repeat my question. What are you doing back here when there’s an open warrant out for your arrest? Yeah, it’s been twenty years since you’ve shown your face in Gunn Landing, but still...” The straits must be dire indeed if they’d chased my fugitive dad north of the border again.
“You sure there’s no single malt whiskey around?”
“I’m sure.”
His face took on an serious expression. “Some warrants are worse than others, Teddy, and while the feds might want to do unpleasant things to me, at least their unpleasantness won’t involve cem
ent galoshes. Whereas the young gentleman’s relatives ... Well, let’s just say they’re already mixing up the cement.”
It took me a moment to understand. When I did, some of my earlier panic returned. My darling dad was talking about a death warrant. “Don’t tell me you didn’t pull a fast one on the Mafia!”
“Not the Mafia. Even I know better than that. But as it turned out, the young gentleman in the casino was the only son of Seamus Fitzgerald.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph! You scammed Chuckles Fitzgerald’s son?!”
Mere months before my husband left me, the San Francisco newspapers had been filled with stories about the Seamus “Chuckles” Fitzgerald murder trial. Fitzgerald, who’d supposedly made his fortune in import/export—but everyone, especially the cops, knew better—was suspected of murdering his cousin, James “Little Jimmy” Hannon. Little Jimmy had ratted Chuckles out to the feds over various money-laundering schemes, and soon afterwards, Little Jimmy was found floating down the Sacramento River. Without his head.