Rogue Wave

by Susan Dunlap

  The lanky man stuck his head in the cabin. “I got three quarters worth of bait. That okay?”

  Pedersen looked at his clipboard. “Plenty.”

  “Time to find Harpoon, huh?”

  “Time to check the damn poles. Go on,” he snapped.

  The deckhand shrugged off Pedersen’s anger and stomped to the stern. Pedersen turned back to Kiernan. “Okay, detective, your ten minutes are up.”

  Kiernan downed the dregs of her coffee. What was the significance of this particular Harpoon, and why had the mention of it gotten to Pedersen? A look at him told her she’d fare no better than the deckhand with that line of questioning. Instead, she said, “But if Robin was as careful as you say, why didn’t she hire more than one deckhand?”

  “Early Bird was smaller than the Dream. A helluva lot more elegant. Going out in Early Bird was like sitting in the front parlor. Robin took corporate groups, maybe only five or six guys. Corporation pays as much as twenty guys do. Lot less work. Look, I’ve got to—”

  “Okay.” Kiernan stood up. “You inherited some of the corporate groups. Who’re the contact people?”

  He wasn’t prepared for that, she could tell. It was a moment before he said, “I can’t give out their names.”

  “Ben, you said you’d help me however you could. You cared about Robin.”

  He glanced toward the dock and back. “Okay, I’ll check. Call me tonight.”

  “Come on. You can remember one or two.”

  “I’d rather check and be accurate.”

  “Ben. When someone dies suspiciously, the trail gets cold real fast. You can’t afford to have me sitting around doing nothing all day today while the trail freezes. Just do the best you can. Give me the names you remember.”

  A woman in a beaked cap clambered aboard, pole in one hand, a red and white hamper weighing down the other.

  “Hey, Teresa. Good to see you,” Pedersen said, suddenly more jovial-sounding than she could have imagined.

  “Ben.” Eyeing Kiernan, she said, “This your new lady?”

  “No, hon. She’s just leaving. And the only lady in my life is Nelda here.” He patted the boat.

  Kiernan didn’t move. “Names?”

  “Okay,” he muttered. “Dwyer Cummings.”

  15

  SO DWYER CUMMINGS HAD been a frequent passenger of Robin’s. And now of Ben Pedersen’s. Pedersen might be sorry Robin was gone, but it sure hadn’t inhibited his business sense. Pedersen, Kiernan thought, was a man she’d trust a lot more in the ocean steering a boat than here on shore.

  Dwyer Cummings, spokesman for Energy Producers’ Group. From what she’d heard of Cummings in the radio debate with Jessica Leporek she could picture him, leaning back in one of those swivel chairs in the rear of a boat, pole in the holder, beer in hand, a grin on his sunburned face as he explained to the guy next to him that offshore drilling platforms made great habitats for fish. No wonder Ben Pedersen hadn’t had a sign supporting the initiative in his boat. If Pedersen was in financial trouble, he wouldn’t be about to offend a source of income like Cummings.

  Kiernan walked back to the restaurant end of the dock and looked wistfully at the dark windows. Why couldn’t just one of those places be open? Eating eggs, ham, muffins, home fries, and keeping surveillance on the dock at the same time—that was the right way to investigate. Sighing, she pulled her jacket tighter and settled in to watch one of the still-unemployed deckhands as he made his rounds from boat to boat.

  The crowd around Pedersen’s boat had moved on board. He had indeed benefited from Robin’s absence, Kiernan thought. But had it been enough to pull him out of his financial hole?

  By six-fifteen, the sea lion had been joined by two others, and the barking sounded like a kennel at feeding time. The jobless deckhand—Zack, she’d heard him called—ambled toward the sidewalk, hands dug deep into the pockets of his too-large jeans. There was an uncertainty to his step, not quite a shuffle, which, if Kiernan hadn’t known better, she would have sworn came from a couple of days on a rolling boat.

  “No luck, Zack?” she asked.

  He shrugged. Like his jeans, his windbreaker was too large. A gust of wind caught the faded blue fabric and it flapped against his narrow ribs. For a moment it looked as if he’d be blown off the dock. “It’s a long haul back to my room,” was all he said.

  Kiernan smiled. This was a man ready to deal. “Did you know Robin Matucci?”

  “Early Bird? The one who went under? Sure.”

  “Tell me about her over breakfast.”

  “And a ride back to my room?”

  “Done. Come on.”

  The fancy restaurants may have been still closed, but a tourist mecca was not without its advantages—plenty of motels with 24-hour restaurants or coffee shops. The nearest was two blocks away.

  As Kiernan walked in, she noticed almost automatically that there were no closed phone booths. The blatantly fake “nautical” decor looked as out of place as the people in the room—mostly white-clad tourists who were used to humid mornings in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, or warm nights in Lakewood, New Jersey, folks from normal climates who hadn’t believed the warnings they’d got about the chill morning fog in San Francisco. Now they sat shivering in shorts and thin tennis sweaters. In contrast to their crisp, clean whiteness, Zack looked like a sack of garbage left behind by the last shift. His frayed wool cap and salt-stained windbreaker seemed ridiculously out of place behind the lime-green tablecloth and pink napkins.

  “I’ve traveled enough to know the safest bet for breakfast in places like this,” Kiernan told him, glancing at the menu. “Eggs scrambled medium—it’s hard to screw that up, but get lots of ketchup in case they do; wheat toast and plenty of jelly. Lots of coffee, regardless of what it tastes like.”

  “Bacon?”

  “Right, bacon or ham.” She smiled. “Never order sausage if you haven’t counted the strays.”

  “How about a beer?”

  What he did to his liver wasn’t her business. Who was she to … But she knew no amount of arguing could erase the memory of all the cirrhotic livers she’d seen in bodies too young to be dead. “The offer was breakfast.”

  “I have beer with breakfast.”

  “Don’t wheedle. You want breakfast and the ride, or not?”

  He scowled. His skin wasn’t puffy, but he had the look of old, weather-exposed wood—gray and sere, all resilience gone, held up by the support posts of familiarity.

  When they’d ordered, she said, “So tell me about Robin Matucci. You ever work for her?”

  “No.”

  “Ever try?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered, mostly to his napkin.

  “Why?”

  “Pay.”

  “Why didn’t you get on?”

  He shrugged. Clearly he was going to give as little as possible in return for his nonalcoholic meal. His face tightened in anger, but Kiernan couldn’t read him well enough to guess whether it was a reaction to her continued questions, or something else. Zack was one of those sources who needed to be coddled. But “bedside manner” had never been her strong point. She’d have to make some effort, though. “Robin had a reputation for hiring deckhands who weren’t too bright.”

  Zack laughed. “Not too bright, that’s a good one.”

  “But why, Zack?”

  “She had to be the boss. She was real nice around the dock. But on Early Bird she couldn’t stand a guy who could bait a hook without her permission.”

  The food arrived. Zack glared down at it. Ignoring him, Kiernan mixed the bacon in with the eggs, lathered the jelly on the toast and dug in. After Tchernak’s breakfasts all others huddled together in mediocrity, but that didn’t keep her from downing them. When she looked up, halfway through, Zack had finished the bacon and toast. His face looked less gray, and the fearful squint of his eyes had relaxed.

  Kiernan put down her fork. “Tell me about Carlos Delaney. Was he as dumb as Robin liked?”

  �
��No way. Delaney was a bright guy. I’ll tell you how bright he was.” Zack leaned forward conspiratorily. “He sized her up real quick. And she probably never caught on.”

  “How’d you catch on?”

  Zack grinned, exposing a space where a left lateral incisor had once been. “His questions. He may have got her number—he had to do that if he planned to keep his job—but he didn’t bother to get mine. He figured just what you did, that Zack’s an old alky with slosh for brains, right?” He stared at her until she nodded and smiled. “He used me like a textbook. Where was this on the boat, where’s the best place to keep that? Asked me how the loran worked, for Chrissakes. Didn’t even know about triangular navigation.” He laughed. “He even asked me what a harpoon was.”

  Harpoon. That was the second time that word had come up this morning.

  “Do you use harpoons with party-boat fishing?”

  Zack laughed louder, a surprisingly raw sound. At the table behind him a couple turned to stare, then eyed each other as if to say, “Only in San Francisco.” Oblivious, he said to Kiernan, “Jeez, you’re no Einstein either. If we gave harpoons to some of the geezers we take out, they’d be over the side with them.”

  “So why did Carlos ask?”

  Zack leaned across the table. “He didn’t say.”

  “But you figured it out?” Kiernan prompted.

  “Oh yeah. He asked me three times. Probably thought I wouldn’t remember. Robin made calls to ‘Harpoon’ on the ship-to-shore radio. Delaney thought it was a place, like a lighthouse or a cove, or maybe it had some kind of code meaning.”

  “Why’d he think that?”

  “I don’t know. Delaney wasn’t a big talker.”

  Maybe he just hadn’t talked to Zack. “Where’d he live?”

  “He spent a week at the Neptune. A lot of us stay there. But that was a month and a half ago. Then he moved. I don’t know where.”

  “Why did he move, Zack?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe he learned all he wanted to know about us by then.”

  Kiernan signaled for the check, paid it, stopped in the bathroom—another rule of the investigator: never pass up an indoor privy—and met Zack at the Jeep. It was light now, the sun had risen high enough to expose the lid of gray over the city.

  She started the Jeep and pulled into traffic. “Zack, what do you think of Ben Pedersen?”

  “It’d take a lot more than a meal to make me rat on Ben. Ben’s father and grandfather fished from the wharf. Ben’s been on boats since he was a kid. He’s more ‘wharf’ than that bastardized bunch of boards they’ve got left there is. The wharf used to be a working dock; used to be home to the fishing fleet. No more. Only enough boats left to con the tourists into thinking it’s real. Don’t you go saying nothing against Ben. He’d give up his balls before he’d let anything happen to the Dream.”

  “What would he have given up for Robin Matucci?”

  For the first time Zack looked surprised. “He tell you about him and Robin?”

  “No way else I’d know. Way it sounded,” Kiernan said, embellishing her suspicions, “he was crazy about her, but maybe she wasn’t so sure.”

  “She coulda done a lot worse than a guy like Ben Pedersen. With him, she’d never have had to worry. He’d have done anything for the boat.”

  The light turned yellow. She stepped on the gas and pulled hard on the wheel, cutting off a sports car revving up to jump the light. Good thing Tchernak couldn’t see this. “You won’t buy the guy a beer because you don’t want him to die of cirrhosis,” Tchernak would be saying. “Never occurs to you people die in crashes?” She looked at Zack, but if he had any qualms he was concealing them. “Zack, did you ever hear Robin talking to her sister?”

  He sat up. “She didn’t have a sister.”

  “The red-haired woman who met her at the wharf from time to time?”

  “That wasn’t her sister,” he said as if announcing a herring wasn’t a salmon.

  “Who was she then?”

  “Pull over here. On the right. Behind that truck.”

  “Do you know who she was?”

  “Yeah. But that’s not part of breakfast.”

  “Fair enough. How much?”

  “Hundred.”

  “A hundred! No way, unless the redhead was Dan Quayle in drag.”

  “Okay, seventy-five.”

  She extricated two twenties and held them out.

  “Jessica Leporek.”

  “Jessica Leporek, the head of the Initiative Campaign here? She was Robin’s friend?”

  But Zack had already snatched the bills and left.

  “Jessica Leporek,” Kiernan said to Brad Tchernak, “was Robin’s friend.”

  “Our Jessica Leporek, head of the initiative drive in San Francisco?” Tchernak whistled.

  Ezra howled.

  “Then Robin Matucci must have supported the initiative. From everything I hear around headquarters down here, the initiative is Jessica’s whole life. She wouldn’t waste her time with someone who isn’t for it. And, frankly, I don’t think anyone who wasn’t a fanatic could put up with her.”

  “Would you like to guess who one of Robin’s main passengers was?” Kiernan leaned back and pictured Tchernak at the other end of the line, his tan, beautifully muscled chest half visible over the blankets he’d never admit he was still under at seven-thirty in the morning. But she could interpret Ezra’s whines in the background.

  “Who?”

  “Dwyer Cummings.”

  Tchernak whistled again. Ezra howled louder. “Did Jessica know that?”

  “I’ll ask her as soon as I see her. She’s not at the office yet.”

  Ezra whined.

  Kiernan pictured Ezra, his wiry muzzle resting anxiously on Tchernak’s bare arm, his skinny gray tail wagging hopefully. She could hear canine toenails scraping the floor, then a more distant whine, faint enough to mean Ezra had crossed the room and was waiting at the door. “Tchernak, you clod, you haven’t taken him for his run yet, have you?”

  Ezra whined louder. He had already had his customary phone “talk” with Kiernan.

  Turning back to the question that had been gnawing at her, she said, “Robin Matucci’s smart enough to make herself the most successful captain at the wharf. But she made a point of hiring the dumbest deckhands, and she played both sides on Prop. Thirty-Seven. What was she up to?”

  “Got me. But I’d be willing to bet, if Jessica found out about Dwyer Cummings, Robin would have heard about it. And so would everyone within a hundred yards of the dock.”

  “Get the word on both of them. And run background checks on the following: Ben Pedersen, Skip Olsen—”

  “Skip Olsen? Hey, what’s going on up there? Can’t you trust even him?”

  “Probably. This is just insurance.” She hesitated so long Tchernak said, “And?” “And while you’re at it, get one on Marc Rosten, M.D.” Tchernak guffawed. “The old boyfriend. Never split from a private eye, huh?”

  Kiernan started to protest, realized there was no good protest, and said, “I’ll call you back at noon.”

  “Hey, remember.” No fenestration. Stay out of other people’s windows.”

  “Tchernak, nagging is such an unattractive quality in a servant.”

  16

  KIERNAN PARKED ON UPPER Market Street, at the top of the Dixie Alley staircase, and walked down the twenty or so steps to number 17.

  Skip Olsen was standing on the narrow deck outside his door, staring out at the panorama of Oakland and Berkeley across the Bay. He was wearing a red-and-gold Forty-niners’ sweatshirt: Back-to-Back Superbowls XXIII-XXIV. Glints of sun broke through the fog, highlighting his cheekbones. For a moment Kiernan felt she was looking at a much younger man—a Skip Olsen who was angular, healthy, and almost handsome, she realized with a start.

  “Kiernan,” he said as she opened the gate, “you don’t waste any time.”

  “I don’t have any time. I’ve been up since four.”
r />   “Come in. Coffee?”

  “Unless you’ve got straight adrenaline,” she said, following him through the sliding glass doors to the dining area.

  “Cream?” he asked, already pouring. He handed her the cup.

  She took a swallow, trying hard not to scowl in disgust. She was a coffee snob, and she knew it. It was one of her few food snobberies that predated Tchernak. Many more had been added since he’d taken over her kitchen, but none equaled her distaste for weak coffee.

  “Doctor told me to cut it out,” Olsen said, “but I figure the vices will still be there when I get around to curing them. So what’ve you got to report?”

  Kiernan laughed. A little jockeying for control? “You first.”

  “Okay. Maureen Brant just got off the horn.”

  “This early? I arranged to call her at ten.”

  Olsen shrugged and took a swallow of coffee. “She couldn’t wait. Called the minute the grocery opened.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “The obvious. She wants to know if you’ll take the case. I told her I thought so. Right?”

  “As it happens, you were right. But I might have found something at the wharf that would have made me decide differently. Don’t presume for me, okay?”

  “Sor-ry,” he said, in an adolescent cadence that negated the apology.

  “Is Maureen waiting at the store for me to call?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll get back to her before I leave.” Sliding into the chair across from him, she told him what she’d learned.

  Olsen leaned forward eagerly, settling forearms on the table, never taking his eyes from Kiernan’s face. “Dwyer Cummings, huh? Very interesting.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Only what I read in the paper and the business magazines. I’ve got a lot of time to read. I figured I’m not going to get any boost from having been a cop, but I grew up in the city. I dare you to find anyone who knows San Francisco better than me.”