“I wouldn’t know. Whatever floats your boat. I wouldn’t know.”
“I sure wish I knew.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to come on to her.”
“Forget it. You ain’t her type.”
“No offense, but how do you know?”
“She’s a straight-up babe. She ain’t no saloon floozy.”
“She’s a cuppie, ain’t she? I mean, she’s always with those sailors.”
“She has her reasons, man,” Simon said boozily, pushing his face close to Fortney’s. “She don’t give a fuck about that big piece a shit next to her! And she ain’t the type that appreciates somebody comin’ on to her in a bar. Know what I mean, dude?”
Simon was shooting Fortney his surliest sneer, and Fortney was debating whether to kick the stool out from under him or buy another drink with the last of his bucks.
He bought the drinks, and Simon seemed to forgive his lusting after Blaze Duvall.
After waiting for Simon to guzzle the next double shot, Fortney said, “I don’t mean offense of any kind, but the way you’re talking? I get the feeling maybe she’s sort of…your girlfriend? If she is, I’ll keep my oar in the boat.”
“I know her real good, put it that way,” Simon said.
“You ever…date her?”
“Dude, you sure ask a lotta personal questions!” Simon’s elbow slipped off the bar.
Fortney grabbed him before he fell from the stool, saying, “I don’t mean disrespect. I’m interested in her, is all.”
“In her or me?”
“Come again?”
“I figured you for a sissy,” Simon said, “when you started buyin’ the drinks. I figured you smoked the pink cigar. Now I don’t know what the fuck to think. You a rump rider or what?”
“The man has charm,” Fortney said to a stuffed sailfish hanging high on the wall. “You have to say that for him.”
“Who?” Simon demanded, looking up at the fish.
“Never mind. No, I ain’t horny enough to chase guys. Yet.”
“Well, you got no chance with Blaze,” Simon said. “So forget it, understand me?”
That did it. Regardless of how pathetically obsessed he’d become with a cuppie named Blaze, Fortney had had it up to here with this little maggot.
He picked up his bar change and started to leave, but suddenly he whirled, saying to Simon Cooke, “I gotta ask you one thing, man. I bought enough drinks to deserve an answer.”
“Yeah?” Simon muttered. “What’s that?”
Fortney said, “Why the fuck would a woman like that waste even a nanosecond on a little gob of mucus that smells like nerve gas in a Japanese subway? That’s all I wanna know!”
Simon Cooke pushed close again, saying, “You callin’ me a Jap or what?”
Fortney didn’t answer. He just hooked his sneaker around Simon’s stool and jerked it sideways, sending the little boatyard gypsy tumbling across the beer-soaked floor.
While staggering past Blaze’s booth on his way to the exit, Fortney stopped and warbled a lyric at her: “Wild thing! You make my heart siiiing!”
She never even noticed the crooning drunk.
—
Fortney wasn’t San Diego PD’s only multiple-marriage victim who was lonely that evening. Anne Zorn had gone to bed early after trying unsuccessfully to get interested in an issue of Vanity Fair that was all about Hollywood and movie stars. The trouble was, she couldn’t concentrate. Not when she was working on a hot homicide and had herself a suspect she wanted badly.
She wondered if it was because of her own early experiences in the Vice Unit. The first time out she’d been so young, so green. She’d never forget how exciting it had been getting plucked from patrol for a vice assignment. Those were the days when the females were still called “policewomen” rather than “police officers.” When they had to wear horrible tunic uniforms with no belt loops, so when you’d run after people your gun’d go sliding around to the front and you’d lose your handcuffs. When their hair wasn’t allowed to ever touch their collars, and they had to wear stupid hats like U.S. Navy Waves. Someone had stolen Anne’s hat, God bless the thief.
In those days salty male cops would say things like “Your zipper should be in the crotch. Tell me, Officer, what kinda cop doesn’t have a zipper in the crotch?”
She’d dropped her Handie-Talkie radio in the toilet more than once, trying to unwrap herself from that stupid uniform. The antennas were always bent from being dropped by women.
A police academy classmate, one of the few females who’d survived with her, had had enormous breasts and every time she’d put pens in her breast pocket they’d point straight out. The male cops used to say, “I’m intimidated by torpedoes pointing at me.” They had lots of fun with the women back before sexual harassment. And in those days they’d still call women “chrome-plated” if they ever dared to date a black cop.
But there was something they’d done for her back when she was between marriages. Her rented house had burned down with everything in it, and those old cops had taken over, buying clothes and toys for her daughter, Frannie, as well as clothes for her. Then they’d passed the hat and found her a place to live. They’d been supergenerous, those old misogynists.
Anne wondered if the reason she was so emotionally involved with this case was because she’d been a make-believe street whore herself. Sometimes when she’d been out there on Midway Drive or El Cajon Boulevard, an Oliver Mantleberry had hit on her and tried to cajole or scare her into becoming his old lady. And in those days she’d had no wire, only a backup team that she’d hoped watched through binoculars, waiting for the signal when she got a violation from a john.
She remembered a guy who’d offered her $35 for an entire night. She’d given the signal for Code Two Cover.
When her backup rushed in and grabbed the guy, she’d said to him, “Whadda you take me for? Thirty-five bucks for all night? I’m insulted!”
Then there was the British Airways pilot who’d stopped her on Midway Drive one night. He’d had wavy blond locks, dreamy brown eyes, a trim body, and an accent like Roger Moore’s.
When he made the offer, she’d said, “You’re a doll! I’ll go with you for nothing!”
“What?” he’d said. “Beg your pardon?”
“Forget it,” she’d said with a sigh. “Get outta here before my partners nail you.”
The Brit had looked thoroughly confused, but he’d sped away from the bonkers streetwalker just before a minibus full of college kids had pulled up and asked for a group rate.
Then there was the time one of the johns had turned out to be a serial rapist, one who liked to drive up to a hooker and get out of the car to talk business. If the girl didn’t go for his action, he’d force her into his car at gunpoint, take her to a remote location, rape her, then beat her half to death to consummate the act, rape being more about violence than sex.
Anne was wearing a wire the night she’d encountered him, and when she was about halfway through her spiel about what he expected for his money, he’d whipped out a cheap foreign .380 pistol. At ten yards it’d be about as accurate as a can of whipped cream, but he’d been only two feet away.
He said, “Get your ass in the car!”
And she said, “Oh! I see you have a gun!” for the benefit of her cover team, who were supposed to be listening but had left their van after a drunk rear-ended it.
He said, “Get in now!”
Anne looked frantically both ways on Midway but the team wasn’t there. So she said, “Man, I have a filthy case of herpes and you wouldn’t—”
“Now! Or you’re dead!”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “That’s real, isn’t it? That gun! It’s real, isn’t it? That gun!”
Luckily, the cover team had just gotten back to the van in time to hear, “That gun.”
They forced his car to the curb as he was driving away, his right hand on the wheel, his left hand in his lap with the .380 p
ointed at young Anne Zorn.
During the ensuing investigation, they’d tied him to fourteen rapes in San Diego and twelve in Houston. Along with a rape-murder in Phoenix, when he’d let his fun get out of hand.
She’d later married Arnie, one of the vice cops on that cover team. Arnie was a love except that he couldn’t handle serious domestic conflict such as who got the inside seat in a restaurant, thereby being able to take the gun off. Crises like that made Arnie flame out. The marriage had lasted eight and a half months, the worst of her bad choices.
It was during her second tour on the john detail that she’d worked with Letch Boggs and got sent to massage school. The one thing her bosses stressed after teaching her to be a bogus masseuse was that you get your violation of law without ever touching it. Don’t touch it or there goes your case.
As Anne lay in bed with Vanity Fair lying open on her stomach, she thought of Blaze Duvall. Who undoubtedly had to touch it every time she gave a massage.
CHAPTER 11
Ambrose knew he’d not sleep a wink until Blaze called with updates, so he tried to read the latest issue of Cruising World. But it was hard to get into the sailing articles when all he could think of was what might go wrong tomorrow. Oddly enough, he wasn’t worried so much about the personal risk but about what a waste it would be if their plan succeeded and still the Kiwis’ backup boat went on to beat the American defender. Next month he’d be out there on the water for every leg of that 18.55-mile race—praying.
If Dennis Conner’s team became the defender, they’d prevail over New Zealand, he was sure of it. Conner had too much experience, had too many times snatched victory from defeat, was too clever and too lucky to be beaten. Conner was Mr. America’s Cup, and his helmsman, Paul Cayard, was one of the best in the world.
Observers said that Conner and Cayard would certainly win a strange-bedfellows trophy. Rumor had it that Conner had blackballed Cayard when he’d first applied for membership in the San Diego Yacht Club, and people blamed Conner for commercializing the great regatta. But his defenders, like Ambrose Lutterworth, stoutly maintained that the Australian multimillionaire, Alan Bond, had been the first to turn the regatta into a commercial venture when he won the Cup from Conner and the New York Yacht Club in 1983 with his famed winged keel. That victory had paved the way for Conner’s Holy Grail comeback in 1987 off Fremantle in Western Australia.
One thing for sure, ever since Alan Bond won with his innovative design, the America’s Cup keels were more closely guarded than stealth bombers. Tens of millions of dollars were poured into keel design, hull design, sail design. Every syndicate needed one more sail, one more hull, forever begging the question with: “Don’t you want to win?”
Ambrose yearned for a return to a better time, when it was still a yacht race, when there were no computers calculating everything from wind to speed. When human beings reckoned things like westerly swell and southerly chop. When sailors, not aeronautical engineers, decided if a boat should be wide-body stable or narrow and slippery—sailors who lived or died by seat-of-the-pants decisions. When yachtsmen could just go out onto the ocean and race.
But now, famous moguls—Australia’s Alan Bond, New Zealand’s Michael Faye, America’s Bill Koch, and the wiliest of all, Dennis Conner—had determined the future of America’s Cup racing. And computerized boats were floated on a sea of greenbacks vaster than the kelp beds off Point Loma. Boats had become sailing billboards plastered with sponsor logos. When the FCC forbade cigarette commercials on TV, Dennis Conner turned his spinnaker into a huge, ballooning Marlboro ad. He could always find a way.
All Ambrose could hope for was that Conner would find a way against the Kiwis, and there’d be four more years with the Cup in San Diego to put things right, to regain the goodwill that had been so foolishly squandered by rampant egos and the commercial exploitation of what should be the purest sport of them all.
Ambrose longed for a return of daring amateur sportsmen, like the first winning Americans who’d sailed to the Isle of Wight in 1851 when Queen Victoria hosted her world’s fair regatta to celebrate Britain’s mastery of the sea. The upstart American boat, a lightning-quick schooner, not only demolished all British competition but did it so convincingly that when Queen Victoria asked who’d placed second, she was told, “Your Majesty, there is no second!”
That was the sort of yacht racing Ambrose dreamed of resuscitating. To that end he would dedicate himself, if the American defender, whoever it might be, could thwart the New Zealand challenge next month.
It could be done, he knew, if by nightfall tomorrow the 32 boat, called Black Magic, lay in the Kiwis’ boatyard with its back broken beyond repair.
—
She could tell that Miles was getting drunk extrafast because he was growing anxious about a possible sexual encounter. It had always amused her how insecure they were, especially the giants like Miles. He was the kind she’d always had to mother. They practically needed burping. The bigger they come, the softer they fall, Blaze always said.
But when his kind got drunk, they got handsy in order to compensate. He kept reaching under the table, where she sat crammed into a booth with seven boozy sailors, so sloshed they’d begun discussing race strategy in the presence of enemy sailors. That is, when they weren’t on the subject of women. The Aussies were cruder than the Kiwis, but her Kiwi made up for his reticent mates.
“Not now, Miles,” she whispered in his ear when the paw crept a bit too far up her thigh.
“When, then?” he whispered back, hot breath soured by beer and the dozen raw oysters he’d devoured, probably as much for potency myths as for a love of bivalve mollusks.
A middle-aged Kiwi tourist sitting at a nearby table observed Blaze’s dilemma and leaned toward her, saying, “That’s what Jessica Lange had to contend with in King Kong.”
The giant said, “Who invited your opinion, mate?”
Ignoring him, the tourist said to Blaze, “He’s a right eager lad, he is. Just tell him to sod off.”
“You’re a right pain in the arse, you are!” Miles retorted. Then he raised up, his massive thighs taking the table with him.
Drinks spilled, and everyone started yelling.
“Steady on!”
“Ease off!”
“Goddamn it!”
Miles said, “It ain’t me! It’s that old fool over there. Won’t tend to his own affairs.”
“Tell you what, boys,” Blaze said. “I’m going for a pee, and when I get back everybody’s gonna be wearing a happy face. Whaddaya say?”
Blaze slid out of the booth and headed for the ladies’ room. When she got there, she locked the door, took both paper bindles from her change purse, and transferred one of them to the currency compartment in her wallet. She tidied up her hair and lipstick, then returned to the noisy barroom with one bindle in her palm. Instead of going back to the booth, she headed for the bar, jostling through the hordes of boozers.
The drinkers made way, and she said to the bartender, “A mug of Steinlager, please.”
“A pint?”
“If that’s the big one.”
“You got it,” the bartender said with a flirty smile.
Blaze rejected three drink offers in the sixty seconds it took him to draw the New Zealand beer. She paid with a twenty and put the coins into the compartment next to the spare bindle, never noticing the blurry-eyed little drunk at the other end of the bar who was watching her with growing jealousy.
When Blaze returned to the table, she started to sit but appeared to change her mind, saying, “I’m not gonna get turned into a ham sandwich again until I’m sure everybody’s all through jumping up and down.”
“Sit down,” Miles said gruffly, showing off for his mates. “You’re the finest morsel of ham I’ve seen since I came to this bloody country!”
“Nope,” she said. “Auntie Blaze says everybody who has to pee should get up now and go do it. Especially you, Miles. When you raise up, the table goes with you,
as we’ve noticed. So hurry before I sit down and settle in.”
One of the sailors said, “Never mind the table. The whole bloody room shifts when Miles gets up.”
“Okay,” Miles said. “I reckon I’ll go in the gent’s and drain Dennis Conner.”
That made them roar, Aussies as well as Kiwis. All were enemies of the famous Yank and feared his bag of tricks.
When the big man was gone, Blaze forced herself to gulp down some of his beer, and while one of the sailors was telling a joke she peered across the smoky barroom and said, “Speak of the devil! Isn’t that Dennis himself?”
All eyes jerked toward the door. And Blaze emptied one bindle of powder into the mug of Steinlager, quickly stirring it with her finger.
“That’s not Dennis Conner! Blaze, you’re getting pissed!” a Kiwi grinder said. “Go easy on the wine. Switch to beer.”
“Speaking of beer,” she said, “let me borrow some of yours. A big boy like Miles needs his full to the brim.” She grabbed a mug belonging to a Kiwi trimmer and poured some of its contents on top of the Steinlager.
“Hey!” he said. “I need it more than that big horse.”
“Hush!” Blaze said. “Auntie Blaze’ll buy you a new one when you’re ready.”
When Miles came rumbling like a forklift across the barroom, an Aussie yelled, “Did you give Dennis a right good choking?”
“Had Dirty Den squealing like a hog,” Miles said, and everyone laughed.
Blaze said to Miles, “Here you are, mate! A nice fresh pint of Steinlager! New Zealand’s finest brew!”
But Miles curled his lip and said, “That’s worse than the ‘roo piss they serve in Australia. I wouldn’t wash my socks in it.”
Blaze was speechless for a moment. Then, “You’re joking! All Kiwis drink Steinlager. That’s one of your sponsors. The name’s on your hull. It’s on your sail.”
“If it was on my bleedin’ arse I still wouldn’t touch that swill,” Miles said. “Here, Charlie, you drink it.”
“No!” Blaze said, pulling the mug toward her. “I’ll drink it.”
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