Calamity (Captain Grande Angil Mysteries)

by Robert G. Bernstein

  “Why’s that?” I said. “What’s the big secret?”

  It was his turn not to answer.

  “Did Aaron ever mention a family to you?” I said. “Mother, father, brothers? I’m curious why when he died the Coast Guard and police didn’t have a next of kin or anyone else to call. They just figured he was all alone.”

  “Aaron didn’t have no family,” Tanner said. “That don’t make him alone.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “He did have family. A mother.”

  If the news startled Tanner he didn’t let on. He stood immovable, one fist on his hip, his body leaning heavily against the door jam.

  “That who you work for, some broad who told you some shit about being his mother?”

  “Who I work for isn’t as important really as what I was hired to do.”

  “Oh yeah. What was that?” he said.

  “Find out if you were responsible in some way for the kid’s death.”

  Tanner stiffened, pulled himself off the door jam and stepped toward me in a slow but menacing fashion. I didn’t budge from my spot or shift an inch. I had already carved out a tactical position on the porch steps, second from the top. I could never be taller, heavier or stronger than Tanner, but standing where I was, I had balanced the equation. He couldn’t touch me unless he tried with a kick. And I was faster than I looked. If he threw the kick, left or right, I would be taking him down hard. Maybe he figured out he was at a disadvantage because halfway across the porch he stopped in his tracks, told me to “Fuck off!” and sauntered back into his house, slamming the door behind him. The overall effect was kind of humorous because the door hit the jam and bounced open and then closed again, settling about halfway between open and closed.

  The 109 added yet another level of humor to the situation. It wouldn’t start. I had to pop the hood in Tanner’s driveway and dry the points and condenser and distributor cap before I could get back on the road.

  9

  I drove the two miles into town and parked on Main Street, bought a cup of coffee and walked to the lobster wharf just North of the ferry pen. Because of the gale, very few boats had left their moorings, although plenty of guys were around baiting up for tomorrow. Carver’s Harbor opens to the South but it has a dogleg in it and a couple of small islands at the bight for protection. Only a hurricane would cause serious trouble here. If that were to happen, a lobsterman would steam around the corner of the island, head up one of the tidal creeks and tie his boat off to a tree. In severe, catastrophic weather such as a hurricane, boats came from all over Penobscot Bay to hide in the protected anchorages and narrow creeks of the island.

  There was a dockworker standing at the corner of the bait shed taking a cigarette break. He was in his late teens or early twenties, a rugged kid with long blond hair and the makings of a light beard that would never quite look right no matter how old he got. He wore a pair of heavy denim coveralls and a Grunden’s pullover with orange waterproof sleeves and neoprene cuffs. His dirty rubber gloves, with which he had been baiting bags, lay on a stack of empty lobster crates.

  I walked over to him, coffee in hand. “I guess not to many guys went out today,” I said. “Don’t blame them. It’s gusting to fifty at The Rock.”

  The Rock was Matinicus Rock, a thirty foot high ocean pinnacle of granite ledge and boulders at the boundary line of the bay; twenty-two miles from the nearest piece of mainland. It had a NOAA weather station on it and a lighthouse. In days of old, a light-keeper and his family staffed it for the Coast Guard. Now it was completely automated and the only people there were bird biologists working for the National Audubon Society and U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

  “Only fools out today,” he said. “Anson and Two-Crate. They’re having some kind of contest to see who’s the toughest . . . or maybe the dumbest. We haven’t figured it out yet.”

  Maine’s the only place I know of where a complete stranger will have a conversation with you about other complete strangers as if the two of you lived in the same house. In this case, though, I had heard of Two-Crate. He had been given his nickname because he could load the back of a pickup with one hundred-pound lobster crates two at a time, and he could do it all day long.

  That was another thing about coastal Maine, the absolute toughness of the people who were born and raised here. When I first moved to the state thirty years ago I drove it North to South looking for a place to settle. At one point I found myself at a wharf at the end of Tillson Avenue in Rockland. A lobster boat had come in from one of the islands and two fishermen, a lobsterman and his sternman, were loading bags of coal onto the boat. It was low tide, and the truck had been parked with its tailgate to the very edge of the quay. One guy stood in the bed of the truck throwing bags of coal to the other guy standing on the deck of the boat. The guy in the boat was catching them and grunting loudly. These were eighty-pound bags, twenty or thirty of them, dropped from a height of sixteen to eighteen feet.

  That same day, on the return trip through town I stopped at a smoke shop — back in the days when I didn’t travel anywhere without a pack of Lucky Strikes — and I happened to mention to the proprietor of the shop what I’d just witnessed. He shook his head and said that he was packed and headed home to Pittsburgh. When he noticed my confusion he explained that he had gotten into a fight with a clam digger, during which he said he had broken a two-by-four over the guy’s head. “I guess I should have used a steel crow bar,” he added, “because the two-by-four didn’t do anything but make the son-of-a-bitch meaner than a wolverine.”

  I looked over the harbor, at the boats seesawing on their moorings. Just counting the lobsterboats, not the half dozen transient yachts wintering on their moorings, there was a good five or six million dollars in merchandise.

  “Which one of those is Tanner’s boat?” I said.

  The dockworker pointed to a forty-footer named, Nightmare. “That one,” he said. “Forty-foot Wayne Beal. Nice boat.”

  “Very,” I said. “Nightmare. Odd name for a boat.”

  “Ex-wife, maybe,” he said.

  “I had a boat once named the Miss. Vicious before I changed it,” I said.

  He looked at me. “What did you change it for?”

  “Girlfriend. She didn’t like it.”

  “A’yuh, I could see how she might take offense.” He lit a second cigarette off the first and threw the used butt into the harbor. The smoke billowed and I got a whiff. I still enjoyed a smoke occasionally.

  “I don’t think Tanner is married or ever was,” I said.

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Not really. I don’t know why he named it that. Nobody does. He always gives a different answer when somebody asks, too. Or he laughs like it’s a private joke. Maybe it’s an old girlfriend. Maybe he hates his life.”

  “Didn’t he have a different boat last year?”

  “The Renegade. She sank on Hammond Ledge. He got this one after the insurance settlement. Had her built ‘bout the same way.”

  “I sort of remember,” I said. “Last winter sometime. His sternman was killed. Lost at sea.”

  “That’s what they say.” The dockworker looked at me eye to eye for the first time.

  “You live around here?” he said.

  “On the Peninsula.”

  “St. George?”

  “Yep. Turkey Cove.”

  A white-hulled lobster boat came around the bend at Potato Island with a bone in its teeth and all its windshield wipers flapping. The vessel pointed its bow toward the wharf. It had that glistening look of a vessel that had been subject to a thrashing.

  “Turkey Cove. Quiet in there,” he said, throwing his second butt into the harbor and starting for the cargo hoist. “I gotta work. Good talking to you, mate.”

  “Hey,” I yelled after him. “Tanner go pretty hard with that boat?”

  “Not as hard as you would think,” he said, yelling over the force of the wind. “Maybe three days a week during shedder season.”

  I thanked him with a
wave and made my way over to the office. Inside was a clean-cut guy in spotless work clothes going through a stack of paychecks. I asked him if he had any shedders and he said they had a few. I bought four, one and one-quarter-pounders for dinner that he had somebody get for me out of the lobster car at the bottom of the ramp. He weighed the lobsters in a grocer’s scale at the side of the office and stuffed them in a tripled-up paper bag.

  The boat I saw a few minutes earlier was now throttling back. Soon it would be alongside the wharf. It would offload the day’s haul to the two guys standing on the lobster car, the same one that held my bugs half a minute ago. The car was a large wooden float with a pen built into the middle of it. The catch would be weighed, culled and crated and the crates would be dropped into the car. Then the boat would slide or idle back to the hoist area and fill its bait box with herring, mackerel, redfish racks, carp heads or whatever else was available during these increasingly lean fishing years for luring the spiny bugs into their vinyl-coated steel dens.

  I returned to my truck, transferred the lobsters to an empty cooler in the back, then started the engine and drove to the vehicle line at the ferry terminal. I had a good hour before departure so I leaned my head back and tried to sleep. Vague images of a woman dancing in yellow flames invaded my thoughts. I sat upright and considered what Tanner had said: “Aaron didn’t have no family, but that don’t make him alone.”

  10

  I had to move Scara from her summer mooring to her winter berth and figured that on the way I would make a stop at Hammond Ledge. I had been there many times with charters, either scallop diving or treasure hunting, but never to look it over as a potential crime scene. I didn’t expect an epiphany or anything, just some fresh perspective. I brought a copy of the marine casualty report and a transcript of the Tanner interview. The latter included a detailed description of the events leading up to the sinking, as told by Tanner to the casualty investigator the day after the rescue. I had also brought a couple cans of Chunky Soup, four tuna sandwiches, and my usual all around helper, sternman and mate, George Johnson, a.k.a. Stade.

  George, a.k.a. Stade, was a twenty-eight year old white rapper-slash-famous BMXer, hence the nickname, who had cut a few albums and toured overseas with Wu-Tang or whatever the hell they were called. He was a stocky, muscular five foot nine inches tall with a shaved head and piercings and tats. I had met him on a charter several years ago. He and five of his friends had rented my boat for a shark diving expedition. George kept sneaking out of the cage to go one-on-one with the blue sharks we had attracted and I had to holler at him to stay the hell put. He ignored me until a nine hundred pound mako showed up and took a chunk out of his right flipper. From that moment on, I had a special place in my heart for the kid. A fearless adrenaline junky, sure, but smart, too. When the charter had ended I asked him if he’d be willing to work now and again as mate on the boat. We hooked-up a few months later and have been close friends ever since. A strange pair, the two of us. Often, when gathering supplies and provisions or grabbing some lunch around town, I’d notice people’s faces and get the feeling they were thinking: Oh that poor man having to deal with such a no-account, rebellious, uncontrollable son. It made me smile because this seemingly wild, uncontrollable individual owned and managed a multimillion dollar stunt bike business and had a stock portfolio the envy of any bank president.

  It was about two hours after high tide and as a result Scara got a push out of the St. George River from the ebb. We stopped at the General Store in Port Clyde for breakfast sandwiches and dark roast coffee and spent a few minutes jawboning with a few of the local lobstermen who hadn’t yet gotten underway. Typical conversation: Bait was ridiculous at fifty dollars a bushel. Fuel off the charts at three dollars and more a gallon. Bad shedder season. Slow fall and crappy start to the winter. Generally, it sucked being a lobsterman. I told them to try being in the charter boat business.

  I headed around Marshall Pt. and Mosquito Island and then Northeast toward Two Bush Channel. At an area known locally as The Devil’s Half Acre I handed the helm over to Stade and told him to shape a course between Alden Rock and the north end of Metinic. Other than a lingering ground swell, which gave the boat a lazy, monotonous roll, yesterday’s Southerly was a mere shadow of itself.

  I wedged myself into the bench seat on the port side of the wheelhouse and sipped the last of my coffee. George was glancing alternately at the compass, the plotter and me. I liked that about him. He never took anything for granted and ran a boat much like I did, constantly checking and rechecking.

  “What?” I said, finally.

  “Dude, I’m waiting,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “You’re a private dick now,” he said, visibly frustrated and impatient. “You’re on your first case. You’re not going to tell me about it?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I said.

  “Bro, don’t do this to me.” He shook his head. “You’re killin’ me.”

  “OK,” I said. “But there are rules.”

  “The whole world’s about rules. I hate it.”

  “Seriously, I need you to think about this. It changes everything. If I bring you in on this P. I. business stuff it means you’re in for good. For life. It’s like we’re married — no, it’s worse. This is forever.”

  “What can be worse than marriage, man?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Cap’n, in all the years we’ve been together, all the diving trips we’ve been on, all the wrecks you’ve shown me, the bronze cannons we found, that sloop from the Revolutionary War, the silver coins from up the Penobscot River, have I ever let on to anybody about anything we’ve done together?”

  “No,” I said. “You know how to keep a secret. You know what it means to me. It’s why I trust you more than anyone else in my life.”

  “So what’s different?”

  “Because now it’s not just for me. It’s for others. Some good. Some bad. Some I may never meet.” I threw my empty coffee cup in the trash and stood next to George at the helm. He kept his eyes dancing between the view out the windshield, the compass and the plotter. We were abreast of Little Green Island, and the sea was rolling the boat enough for me to need a hand hold.

  “Look, George,” I said, swaying comfortably with the boat’s roll. “I live my life by a certain code, always have, always will. It’s a good code. It works for me. Doesn’t mean I tell the truth all the time, or live by the letter of the law. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Not really, Cap.”

  “There’s an ancient Chinese proverb about friendship. It says you take a dead goat and put it in a large empty rice sack. You take the sack to your best friend and you ask him to bury it for you, without questions and without looking in the sack. If he helps you, and never says anything to anyone about it, he’s a true friend.”

  “That’s fuckin’ sick, Cappy.”

  “No, listen. The idea is he’s such a good friend he knows deep down inside that you would never do anything to jeopardize him. He knows there’s nothing wrong with what you’re asking him to do.”

  “That’s beyond trust,” George said. “Beyond friendship.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No, I mean it’s too much to ask of your friend.”

  “Because you assume it’s illegal. Why can’t it be your friend’s dog and he’s so upset he can’t bring himself to deal with it or ever talk about it to anyone, not even you?”

  “No way, man. I’m not buying it.” George was shaking his head.

  We were abeam of the channel between Little Green and Big Green and George knew I wanted the wheel back before I had to say it. He moved two steps to starboard and leaned against the heavy rubber chafing gear on the hauler. I took the helm and turned to the North. The boat picked up an easy yaw as the greasy swells came under her stern.

  “Well, maybe it loses something in the translation,” I said. “Let me put it another way. Say I start talking to you about
cases and people. You reach a point where you know what I know. One day the cops come and pick me up and throw me in jail for obstruction of justice, because they say I’m withholding information, and I am. They know we’re friends. Maybe they know we work together. So they come to you. Question is, are you going to tell them anything?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Even if they threaten you with arrest.”

  “Not happening, man. I’m not telling them.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because I know you would have a damn good reason for doing what you’re doing. I would know that if it’s important for you not to tell the cops something, then it’s important for me, too. I would be more worried about the harm I could cause by telling them.”

  “You would trust the code,” I said.

  He paused and stared out the window and thought for a few seconds.

  “I would trust the code. Damn right,” he said.

  We were approaching the shoal water on the southeastern edge of Hammond Ledge. I throttled back to slow ahead and turned on the scanning sonar. It took a minute for the brightly colored images to form on the display screen: reds, greens, blues, and oranges, showing the contours and high and low spots on the bottom. We were in about six fathoms. It was dead low tide. In the distance, I could see the southerly swells breaking over a piece of naked ledge. According to the transcript, this was where Tanner said he had lost his boat.

  “Doesn’t look like such a great day to dive,” I said.

  George was looking at the breaking ledge through the binoculars. He lowered them and stared at me.

  “Sure to be better on the next tide,” I said.

  “You want to anchor up and wait it out?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. “You have to be anywhere?”

  “Nope.”

  “Tell you what. We’ll tuck into the lee of Little Green and set the storm anchor and heavy rode off the bow, wait for slack water.”

  “Cool.”

  I nudged the throttle and spun the boat, one eye looking through the window, one eye glued to the scanner. It was hard for me to imagine a seasoned lobsterman like Tanner clipping this corner of Hammond Ledge. Stranger things have happened.