Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) (36 page)

“You mean like Eric was really Erica
?”

“Erica. Right.”

I smiled. “Hell yeah, you should go. I
’d say it was a great opportunity to get close
to your subject.”

She shook her head and looked at
Doc, exhorting him to take over.

“And you’re not
worried at all about the setting?” he asked.

“What, you
mean the slippery, pitching deck and the ice-cold sea
? The potential for a tragic boating accident?”

He nodded. “Yeah
. Exactly.”

I smiled. “Nah. I’ll take my chances. Besides
, there are like six or eight other guys on the
boat besides him and me. What? Are they going to
make me walk the plank or something?”

C
hapter 22

SATURDAY
MORNING I KNOCKED OUT MY
last hard training run before
the race. Over the next few days, I’d be
in what I call the “taper” mode, where I lighten
the miles and the intensity in order to give my
body a bit of a rest before the all-out
effort of the race. Thank God. I like the training
, and I love the racing, but still I was eager
to get on with it. It’s always hard to
peel my mind off the case and focus on training
, particularly when the case is as compelling as Sophie’s
.

Since I needed to be at the marina by nine
, I started at six thirty and did the first six
miles in the dark, which enabled me to be home
and showered by eight thirty. Eric Gaston had sent me
an e-mail the day before with all the pertinent
details: when to be there, what to wear,
etc.
He
said they’d provide foul-weather gear, although I was
hopeful this was just a thoughtful precaution and that it
wouldn’t really be necessary.

“Don’t forget to wear
your life jacket,” Toni said, checking me over at the
door before I left.

“I don’t have a life
jacket.”

“Well, they’d better give you one. Don’t
get on the boat without one, understand?”

I nodded. She
reached up and adjusted my collar, then kissed me on
the cheek. I felt like it was my first day
at school. “If you insist on doing this silly thing
, be careful.” She leaned forward and kissed me again. “By
the way, if anything does happen to you, but by
some stroke of luck you manage to make it back
alive? I’m going to hold it over your head
and tell you ‘I told you so’ for, like, the
rest of your days.” I smiled. She made her little
jokes, but having someone who cares about you—really cares
—is a pretty cool feeling.

I grabbed my duffle bag
and walked downstairs, Toni’s warning about Gaston replaying in
my mind. Ordinarily, I’m not one to rush blindly
into a dangerous situation. Okay—maybe a bit from time
to time. I call it “controlled aggression.” But I like
to think it’s part of my game. Usually, I
’ve found that if I can move decisively and put
a bad guy back on his heels a little, I
can often interrupt his plans and sometimes even steal his
momentum. That’s when he tends to make mistakes. The
trick, of course, is to not overplay my hand or
, worse, find out that by playing my “bold and aggressive
” game, I was actually playing right into his. That’s
bad. And along these lines, I’d do well to
remind myself that the invitation to the boat race was
Gaston’s idea, not mine.

Although it wasn’t raining
, the air was damp and cool with partly cloudy skies
and a brisk breeze from the southwest. I’ll admit
right up front that I’m the ultimate landlubber—I
don’t know anything about boats in general, and even
less about sailing. Even though I’ve lived near the
water in Seattle my whole life, I’ve never even
set foot on a sailboat. Nothing against the water or
boats, I guess I just never got around to it
. In my leisure time, I usually go camping—on dry
land. That said, I figured the steady wind that hit
me in the face as I walked across the parking
lot to my Jeep had to be a good thing
if you were a sailor. I jumped in and took
off.

Saturday morning traffic was light, and it only took
fifteen minutes to reach the Elliott Bay Marina. I parked
and started the walk down to the water level and
to Maggie Bluff’s restaurant, our predetermined meeting point before
loading up for the race.

I’ve only been to
the Elliott Bay Marina a couple of times—once to
go to the Palisade restaurant upstairs and another time to
have lunch at Maggie Bluff’s downstairs. The marina’s
an impressive place. It’s tucked into the northeast corner
of Smith Cove, almost under the Magnolia Bluff (thus the
restaurant name). I’m told that boat slips are expensive
, and the boats that fill them even more so. Unfortunately
, I didn’t have the experience to be able to
tell. I had to admit that to my inexperienced eye
, some of them sure looked expensive.

On the water level
, I looked out across the vast field of boats. All
but the largest were rocking back and forth in the
cool breeze, water splashing up onto the docks. The wind
caused the ropes on some of the boats to slap
against their masts in a rhythmic
bang-bang-bang
kind
of pattern that sounded cool at first—I think they
call it “salty.” As I walked to the restaurant though
, it occurred to me that the constant
banging
on a
windy day would probably drive you insane over time if
you happened to be on the boat parked next door
—a maritime version of Chinese water torture. Still, the cool
air on my face felt great: moist, heavy—alive even
. I was excited about the prospect of going out on
the water and trying something new. Never mind the fact
that my skipper might be a murderer. I turned and
entered the restaurant.

“Danny Logan!” I heard my name called
out as I walked in.

I looked and saw Gaston
seated with a group of men. Except for Gaston himself
, the only one of the group who I recognized was
Robert Brownell. Brownell’s bright red hair nearly matched the
red foul-weather overalls he wore. In fact, the entire
crew wore the same matching red bib-type foul-weather
gear.

“Good morning,” I said as I walked over.

“Glad
you could make it, Danny,” Gaston said. He introduced me
all around. “Danny here is the guy I told you
all about,” he explained to the others. “He’s filling
in for Rod. He’ll be in the cockpit with
me. Danny’s new to sailing. Larry and Jonah, I
was thinking he might help you guys with trimming if
you need it. But with the air this morning the
way it is, we can definitely use some extra ballast
, in any case.” He looked at me. “Although, Danny, I
didn’t realize you were so damn skinny. You might
not be the best ballast in the world.” The others
laughed.

“We can just throw a couple of rocks in
his coat,” Brownell called out, in his funny-pitched voice
. “Remember to take ’em out, though, if we start to
go down.” The group laughed again. They seemed like a
pretty good bunch of guys.

I declined the offer of
anything to eat. I’d never been seasick, but I
was afraid this might be mostly because I’d not
spent all that much time on boats. Just in case
, I wasn’t about to load up on a big
breakfast that might want to come back up an hour
later. Gaston stood up. “Well, guys, we’re here. And
the course is there. We got to bounce on outta
here and sail up to the starting line abeam Shilshole
by eleven. Let’s hit it.”

“Ready to tack!” Gaston
yelled. A few minutes ago, we’d rounded the leeward
mark—the last turn in the race that marked the
start of the final leg toward home. We were now
back on a windward leg, zigzagging our way southward into
the wind toward the finish line. Gaston turned to me
. “Stay right up there on the rail until I call
out, Danny!” he called out as the boat blasted its
way upwind. I nodded. By now, with two-thirds of
the course under my belt, I was getting to be
an old pro at this. My job was pretty easy
: boat leaned to the left, I sat on the right
. Boat leaned to the right, I sat on the left
. What’s so hard about that? Besides, on the windward
leg, the stiff breeze made the boat heel over so
much that if you somehow screwed up and sat on
the wrong side, you’d probably be inches from the
ice-cold Puget Sound water, if not actually in it
.

“Tacking in three . . . two . . . one . . . tacking!” The crew sprung to
action as Gaston spun the huge wheel. Almost immediately, the
big boat shifted course to the left. I mean port
. Which I think actually means we were on what they
called a starboard tack, but I didn’t have that
all the way down yet. There was a mad rush
of activity: the slack sails thundered as the boom swung
across our heads to the opposite side of the cockpit
. The guys at the front of the boat moved the
big sail up front to the other side. Winches were
spun frantically with loud
whirring
and
clicking
noises, causing the
boat to accelerate and heel to the left dramatically. Like
a good human ballast, I scurried up to the opposite
rail to my assigned place and leaned back and hung
on. With the entire crew except Gaston similarly hiked out
over the rail, we helped counterbalance the boat and, I
’m told, increase the all-important boat speed by a
couple tenths of a knot.

I have to say, we
were really flying. Before the race, I had no idea
of the power of the wind. If you’d have
asked me the correct music to accompany a sailboat ride
, I’d have thought of something light and airy like
“A Pirate Looks at Forty” by Jimmy Buffet or maybe
if you wanted classical, Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
. Polite music
. Mood music. Light, warmhearted, fun stuff. Based on my experience
today, I’d have been way wrong. Now, sitting just
inches from the water, I’d have to say that
the more appropriate music would be the “Immigrant Song” by
Led Zeppelin or
Ride of the Valkyries
by Wagner. Nothing
polite about it. I’m talking hard nose: raw, physical
, driving kind of stuff. Kicking ass and taking names kind
of stuff.

According to Gaston, his J/133 sailboat weighed
in at something like 18,000 pounds. Yet, the way the
wind blew the forty-three-foot boat around the course
made it seem like it weighed nothing at all, no
more than a soap bubble in a bathtub. The constant
noise of the wind in the sails and of the
deep blue water blasting past—particularly on the windward legs
—gave me a sensation of the real power of the
elements, something I’d never really experienced like this before
. When the boat pounded into a wave, the cold saltwater
flew back and smacked me in the face with the
stinging force of gravel on a windshield. I learned to
quickly turn away when I saw the spray at the
bow launch into the air and still, the spray blasted
the foul-weather gear they’d thankfully loaned me. It
was like little bullets slamming into the side of a
wall. Holy crap! I have to admit, it was awesome
—an absolute blast. I can see why people get addicted
to this.

I looked back and saw that we were
far out in front of the other boats—only one
other had even rounded the final mark. Unless we did
something goofy like run into a log, we were certain
to cross the finish line first and by a wide
margin at that. That said, I’d learned that crossing
the finish line first didn’t automatically mean you’d
won the race. The handicap ratings that were applied tended
to even out the field and allow the slow boats
to compete with the fast boats, kind of like a
golf handicap.

The windward legs at the start and end
of the race were the busiest for the crew. Since
this meant we were trying to go directly into the
wind—something even the best sailboats cannot do, we had
to constantly tack back and forth to accomplish it, zigzagging
our way to a point several miles away. The entire
crew was kept jumping. The other two legs of the
racecourse with the huge spinnaker sail flying were a little
less busy, providing more time for conversation, but still most
of the conversation was hard-core sailboat racing—something about
laylines and rhumb lines and boat lengths and boat speed
—technical stuff like that, mostly over my head. There was
never a chance to talk to Gaston directly about the
case. I don’t really know what I’d expected
, but there was no privacy on the boat anyway. The
boat was big—the mast incredibly tall, but the cockpit
area where I was stationed with Gaston was small. Even
with half the crew forward on the foredeck, there’d
have been no way to subtly work in questions about
a murder investigation, given that there were never fewer than
four or five people in close proximity to the cockpit
at any given time. I pretty much had to restrict
my investigating to simply watching and observing. Still, I learned
some things about Gaston.