Crow's Landing (6 page)

Virgil milled the oak down to half-inch strips on the table
saw, rounding the edges with a router. He built a steamer out of a steel drum and a couple lengths of aluminum downspout and slid the new oaken ribs inside, stoking the woodstove until the lengths were as pliant as licorice. Then one by one he clamped them into place in the boat and fastened them with cinched copper nails. He repaired the hole in the hull with the new cedar.

When the repairs were done, he sanded and buffed and smoothed the cedar and applied four coats of spar varnish. He pulled the pistons from the old Johnson motor and installed new rings and rod bearings. He rebuilt the carburetor and polished the magneto and changed the plugs and when he put everything back together the motor started on the third pull.

He finished the restoration in late March and on the first warm day in April he towed it to the river, stopping at the place called Brownie's at Kimball's Point. Virgil launched the boat, fired the motor, and idled out into the bay. He spent some time adjusting the carb, then went for a run. The old engine purred along nicely, and the boat planed out, handling the waves beautifully. Virgil spent a couple of hours cruising, stopping here and there to wet a line. The boat leaked a little at first and he had to bail the bottom several times. But the cedar soon grew saturated, and it swelled just as it was designed to, and the leakage slowed and finally quit. Virgil got a couple of nice stripers that day. He'd been back several times since, most recently that very morning. He enjoyed the old boat, and now he was going to have to find out how to get it back.

 * * *

The next morning he drove into the city in search of some answers. He could have stayed at home and waited for the
cop who had confiscated it to be “in touch” as he promised, but Virgil was pretty sure he'd be waiting a long time for that to happen.

Apparently there were three or four precinct houses in the city. On Broadway a man in a pinstripe suit directed Virgil to the one on Arch Street. It was a grungy neighborhood in an old part of the city and the building, a four-story redbrick, fit right in with the surroundings. Virgil told the woman at the front desk what he was there for, then told the story again to a sergeant who came down a flight of creaky stairs at the back of the room. Finally, after waiting out front for forty minutes, he told it for a third time to a detective named Malero. Apparently Detective Malero had already heard it because he answered the accusation before Virgil got finished telling it.

“This department never seized a boat yesterday,” he said. “Nobody in this department, in uniform or plainclothes, was even near Kimball's Point yesterday. We have no jurisdiction there.” They were sitting in a large room, at Malero's desk, surrounded by similar desks. There were other cops, some in uniform and others not, in the room. They were talking among themselves, or working in front of computers. “The badge you saw, what makes you think it was Albany PD?”

“That's what it said. And that's what the guy said who was flashing it.”

“But you never got the number?”

“No,” Virgil said. “I didn't get the serial number of the gun he stuck in my face either.”

Detective Malero raised his eyebrows at the sarcasm. “You should've gotten the badge number.”

“I would've, if I'd known the guy was going to steal my boat.”

“If somebody stole your boat, sir, I can guarantee you it
wasn't a police officer,” Malero said. “I took the time to check with the state police too. They never had a call out at Kimball's Point. Have you considered the possibility that it was somebody posing as an officer? Maybe one of your friends playing a joke on you?”

“He had a badge like yours, and he had a gun like yours. And as jokes go, it wasn't all that funny.”

“I was just speculating.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Virgil said. “You guys drive navy blue SUVs?”

“We have different vehicles that we use.”

“Any of them navy blue SUVs?”

Malero answered that by not answering. Shaking his head to show his aggravation at having to deal with this, he took a pad from a drawer in his desk and searched through the clutter until he found a pen. He asked Virgil for his name and address, and he jotted them down.

“I'll need the boat's registration number,” he said.

“It wasn't registered.”

Malero looked up. “Why not?”

Virgil shrugged. “It's an old cedar strip I bought for fifty dollars last year. I restored it over the winter. I guess I never thought to register the thing.”

Malero put the pen down. “Christ. We're talking about a fifty-dollar boat? You think a police officer from this department drove out to Hooterville or wherever you're from and stole your fifty-dollar boat?”

“I told you I restored it,” Virgil said. He indicated the pad in front of the detective. “See—that's why you need to write stuff down. I restored it and rebuilt the motor. So it's not a fifty-dollar boat anymore.” He hesitated. If he was going to tell the detective about the cylinder, now was the time.

“Okay,” Malero said. “So it's not a fifty-dollar boat. But it's not registered, so I guess we can make the argument that the thing doesn't even exist. How do we go about finding a boat that doesn't exist?”

In that instant, Virgil was no longer thinking about telling the cop about the cylinder. He got to his feet. “Oh, it exists. That's not the problem here. The problem here isn't even that neither one of us knows where it is. The problem is that only one of us gives a flying fuck.”

He went through the station and out the front doors and onto the street. He'd parked a couple blocks away, in a municipal lot, and as he was walking toward it, he passed the compound where the department parked their vehicles. There were quite a few cruisers inside, both marked and unmarked, and several SUVs, mostly dark blue or black. Virgil wished he had thought to take the plate number of the truck that had towed his boat.

Walking past, he saw a guy in a suit, a cop by the look of him, talking to a man in jeans and a faded beige shirt. The second man had his back to Virgil; his gray hair reached past the collar of the shirt. There was something familiar about the guy but Virgil, unable to see his face, couldn't say what it was. As he walked past the compound and into the lot where his truck was parked, he glanced back. The man had finished his conversation and was now out on the sidewalk, approaching the lot where Virgil stood.

It was Buddy Townes.

Virgil waited until Buddy made his way to a dark green Cadillac, maybe fifteen years old, with the right rear quarter crunched in, the damaged taillight secured with a liberal application of duct tape. Buddy fished his cigarettes from a
pocket before opening the driver's door. He was lighting a smoke when Virgil spoke.

“I heard you ran off to Florida.”

It took Buddy a few moments to place him. When he did, he smiled. “Break out of any jails lately?”

“Nary a one.”

Buddy pulled on the nonfilter and nodded his head, as if agreeing to a statement nobody had made. “You want to grab a beer?” he asked.

“It's ten o'clock in the morning,” Virgil told him.

“Rye, then?”

They settled on coffee at a greasy spoon a couple of blocks from the police station. Buddy looked about the same as the last time Virgil had seen him, when Virgil had been on the run from a murder charge in Ulster County. Buddy was fifty-five going on seventy, his face lined and creviced from too many years of liquor and tobacco and general self-abuse. He wore a gray mustache now, the ends dipping down past the corners of his mouth. His voice was, if anything, harsher than Virgil remembered, as if somebody had taken a wood rasp to his vocal chords.

“That Florida dream was a good one, in theory anyway,” he told Virgil when they were settled at a table. “But there were certain things I hadn't counted on.”

“Like what?”

“One—my amazing capacity for pissing away money,” Buddy said. “And two—my equally amazing capacity for finding a high-maintenance and weak-moraled broad to help me do it.”

“Sounds like a perfect exacta.”

“It was a perfect something. Fun while it lasted, though.”

Virgil dumped a little cream into his coffee. “Did Jane Comstock really give you a million dollars?”

“No,” Buddy said. “I asked for that, and she gave me half. And then you and Claire Marchand ran her to ground anyway. She should have kept her money. But she's got plenty left, she ever gets out of jail.”

“How did you end up here?” Virgil asked.

“Here in the city? Well, I don't live here, I'm just in and out. Back to doing some investigative work to pad my shitty little pension. Couple of criminal lawyers in town I work for. Nobody as much fun as Mickey Dupree, but these guys still have pulses.”

Virgil smiled. “Mickey Dupree. Shit, I went to jail for killing the guy, and I just now realized I never even knew the man. That sound right to you?”

“No. But it sounds about the way things are.” Buddy tested the hot coffee. He gestured out the window to the city outside. “No, I wouldn't live here in the city. I rent a place on the river, near Coeymans. Got used to living on the water down in the Keys. Winterized cottage, with a woodstove and a dock. A few bars nearby, within staggering distance. I fish every day I can. I got a little aluminum with a ten-horse on it.”

“I had a boat once,” Virgil said and he told Buddy about the incident at the marina.

“And metro is denying any knowledge of it?” Buddy asked when he was finished.

“They're suggesting it wasn't a real cop.”

Buddy took a drink of coffee, thinking. “It's still a stolen boat. And you're a citizen making a complaint. They can't exactly ignore that.”

“Apparently it's a jurisdiction thing.”

“But the cop who took it claimed to be Albany PD?”

“Yeah,” Virgil said. “And he had the badge.”

“They should be looking into that, if nothing else.”

“Another thing against me,” Virgil said. “The boat wasn't registered. I bought it from a farmer and fixed it up and I never thought to register the thing.”

“Do it now.”

“How?”

“Find out if the farmer had the numbers and do it after the fact,” Buddy said. “It's still your boat. Just because somebody stole it doesn't change that. You filed a theft report. The cops can't ignore that.”

“I guess not.” Virgil finished his coffee.

“But that's not the bigger question here,” Buddy said. “Obviously the guy wasn't interested in your boat. You got no idea what was in the cylinder?”

“None. The thing had no cap, no valve, nothing to access it. It was welded tight. And I'm pretty sure it was stainless steel, which means it would have lasted a lot of years down there.”

“Sounds like something you would do with contaminated waste,” Buddy said. “But why the fuck would anybody want to seize a cylinder full of waste?”

“And pretend to be a cop while he was doing it.”

“Yeah,” Buddy said in agreement. “I can ask around if you want. I don't know these boys like back in Ulster County, but I can ask.”

“Sure. I couldn't care less about the cylinder, I just want my boat back.”

“I don't blame you,” Buddy said as he stood up. “But you got to be curious about that fucking cylinder, man.”

“Yeah.”

They left money for the coffee on the table and walked out onto the sidewalk. Buddy lit a cigarette before turning to Virgil.

“You realize that curiosity can be a dangerous thing.”

“That's just for cats,” Virgil said and he crossed the street, heading for his truck, and home.

 * * *

Driving out of the city, Virgil went back over his conversation with the detective named Malero. While it was obvious that the cop had zero interest in the missing boat, Virgil's gut told him that the man wasn't actually covering anything up. Maybe it
was
somebody posing as a cop who took the boat. Or an ex-cop with an agenda. If either was the case, then maybe Buddy Townes would turn something up.

Whoever it was who had taken the cylinder, he'd shown up at the marina pretty damned quick. It couldn't have been more than an hour from the time Virgil docked the boat until the man in the SUV arrived. Someone had called him and Virgil was about ninety-nine percent certain who that someone was.

He pulled into the marina shortly before noon, parked by the tackle shop, and went inside. Mudcat McClusky was at the counter, selling bait minnows to a couple of fishermen, both elderly and of Asian descent. One man asked if they were catching perch off the pier. Normally a question like that would have Mudcat rambling at length, delivering all manner of detail regarding the fish being caught, whether what he said had any truth behind it or not.

“I ain't a fishing guide, nipper,” he said to the man. “You're gonna have to figure that out for yourself.”

Virgil held the door for the two men as they left, and he saw the anger in their eyes.

“Hey, Virgil,” Mudcat chirped when they were gone.

“Where's Brownie?” Virgil asked.

“Went over to Home Hardware for deck screws. We're fixing those stairs down to the dock. I'm going to—”

“Who'd he call about the cylinder yesterday?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yesterday,” Virgil said. “I came off the river with that steel cylinder in my boat and you came down to the dock and had a look and then you came scurrying up here like the little schoolgirl that you are, and told Brownie about it. And then he walked over to that phone there and made a call. Who did he call?”

“Come on, Virgil,” Mudcat said. “I never done any such thing. I don't think I even mentioned the cylinder to Brownie. None of my business.”

Virgil watched Mudcat's eyes, how they shifted back and forth, looking for someplace safe to settle. “When's Brownie due back?”