Old Poison (14 page)

There was no name on the building, and the
place was surrounded by a security wall with a buzzer at the gate.
I pressed the button, and a woman’s husky voice said, “May I help
you?” This phrase is one of the most fallacious utterances in the
English language. The speaker almost never means to offer
assistance of any kind. In this case, I translated the words and
the tone as, “Who the hell are you and what do you want?”

When my Maker deprived me of visual memory,
She tried to make up for the deficit by providing me with superior
auditory and olfactory memory. My ear for accents was honed by a
nomadic childhood, as my dad moved us from mine to mine around the
world. It developed into a pretty fair talent. I conjured up an
audio memory of my college friend Carolyn Larson, and appropriated
her light Norwegian accent.

“Good afternoon. I am sorry to trouble you,
but I am Clara Shimmerhorn of the Shimmerhorn Insurance Agency and
I would be grateful if you could assist me with some small
information on a claim.”

“What kind of claim?”

“Only a little one, a slight boat bumping.
Please could I come in and talk to you? I will only take two
minutes of your time.”

There was no further answer, but the gate
lock buzzed and opened. I followed the walkway to the building and
heard another click as I reached for the door handle. Behind a
large wooden desk in the atrium entry sat the gatekeeper. She was
at least fifty-five, had dry, badly bleached hair, and a face so
hard I would expect her to be tending bar in one of San Pedro’s
tough little taverns, not running the front desk of a corporate
office. I checked her name plate.

“How do you do, Mrs. Fagan. I am Mrs.
Shimmerhorn.” I presented my business card and an accident claim
form I had created at Sam’s. Fagan picked them up, glanced briefly
at the form, then looked at me impatiently.

“I just need to get one small piece of
information from you, please, Mrs. Fagan. My clients were boating
in the inner harbor over by Seal Beach and had a slight run-in with
another boat. It caused some damage to the hull and the
electronics. Nothing major, no injuries, just . . .”

“Mrs. Shimmerhorn, get to the point. What do
you want?”

“Oh, well, as I was explaining we are trying
to settle this claim, but we can not seem to find the other boat or
the boat owners. We have learned that at the time of the accident
the boat had been stolen but . . .”

“Was this a boat owned by our company or
what?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Fagan, but you see, you hold
the lien on the boat and I am hoping you might be able to give me
the current address of the company that owns it or the marina and
boat slip where it is kept.”

“Then I am sorry you wasted your time. You
should have called. It is against company policy to give any
information regarding our accounts. Good day.”

“Oh. Then I am so sorry to have to waste
your time. I hoped we might do this the easy way. I apologize, but
I must then present you with these subpoenas. Here is one for you,
one for your company president, one for your accounts manager, and
a subpoena
duces tecum
for the specific records of the boat
and–”

“Hold on, hold on. Let me see what I can
do.” She grabbed back the claim form, pressed the intercom and
searched the form for details.

“Charlene,” she bellowed in her rusty,
cigarette-alto.

“Yes, Mrs. Fagan?”

“Look up Offshore Deep Driller, Inc., and
give me their address.”

“Just a moment.” Voices, laughter, and paper
shuffling played over the open intercom while we waited.

“Here it is. I only have a U.S. address for
them. They’re based out of Venezuela, I think. It’s just Box 1902,
1792 East Martinez Street, San Pedro, California.”

Fagan and I both scribbled down the address.
Before she could hang up I asked, “Does she have the boat
slip?”

“Do you see a loan for a boat?”

“Four of them.”

Fagan grimaced. I pointed to the CF number
on the claim form, and she read it to the clerk who then gave us
the name of a marina and a slip number. Success in less than five
minutes. I gathered up my fake subpoenas and gave Fagan a smile.
“Your company is lucky to have someone as efficient as you to cut
through the red tape for them. Thank you so much.”

With a smile as phony as mine she laced her
whiskey voice with heavy sarcasm. “Oh, you’re just so welcome.”

The marina Charlene had come up with was
right on Terminal Island. It was not one of the glamorous marinas
you find in Long Beach or Newport Beach where the yuppies keep
their pleasure yachts. The boats here are nestled into a little
niche of the working harbor; most of them looked just as grubby as
the surrounding buildings. Many were live-aboards, and were so
covered with plants, bicycles, BBQs, boxes, and other paraphernalia
of daily life that they could not have been out of their boat slips
in years.

I stood on the bank watching a pair of giant
cranes load a freighter that was docked just across the channel.
The smaller crane wheeled back to a pile of containers, picked one
up, and carried it to the gantry crane. The gantry lifted the
container up and out over the ship, then lowered it carefully into
place on deck. Amazing machines. I thought about the thousands of
men who used to do the loading with simpler devices and with the
strength of their backs. A lot of time and back injuries were saved
by going to containers and cranes, but thousands of jobs lost. I
wondered which way served mankind best.

As I watched the cranes, an old man watched
me. He sat on the deck of his old trawler in a rocking chair that
had just barely enough room to rock without hitting any of the
piles of stuff stacked around the deck.

I followed the marina to the ocean end,
noting the slip numbers as I went. His eyes followed me. How many
others peeked out of portholes to check out the stranger who so
obviously didn’t belong to this small boat community? On the way
back, I saw that the space for the speedboat was just two slips up
from the old man. It was empty. Continuing up the walkway, I
checked each boat slip in case the boat I was looking for had
moved. It was nowhere in this marina. I returned to the old man in
his rocking chair.

“Good afternoon.”

He rocked the chair a couple of times to
launch himself, then stood on wobbly legs and hobbled over to the
bow of the boat. “I’ll bet you’re a social worker.”

I smiled. Sticking with my Norwegian accent,
I asked, “Oh? What makes you think that?”

He looked surprised, then delighted, then
set me for a loss by answering me in Norwegian. Not having the
vaguest idea what he said, I smiled, “Oh, how wonderful! You speak
Norwegian.”

He was so pleased with himself. “Ha, I knew
it the minute you opened your mouth. I’m a regular Henry Higgins,
just like Rex Harrison. I can pick out a man’s accent every time.
But, no, I don’t speak it, ’cept that little bit and a few words
not so polite. Picked that much up in the Merchant Marine. Knew a
lot of you
Scandawhovians
in those days.”

“That’s very good. Not many people would
know exactly what country I am from. But you lose the other bet.
I’m not a social worker, I’m an insurance investigator.”

“Insurance, huh. You sure you’re not here to
hunt down ol’ Brad Commins for his child support payments?” His
milky gray eyes were probably covered with cataracts, but it didn’t
seem to have slowed his observation of life around him. In
addition, he had that eagerness to talk that so often afflicts the
old and lonely. He was an investigator’s delight.

“No,” I answered, “but if I were, I’ll bet
you would be the one who could help me. Actually, I’m just here to
settle a small insurance claim. I’m trying to find the speedboat
that is supposed to be in slip twelve. Is it out for the day or
moved for good?”

“Actually, it’s probably more like out for
good.” He laughed at his own play on words. “Damn thing woulda sunk
right there if I hadn’t called the Coast Guard.”

“Really? What happened?”

“Well, she was docked here, oh, seven, eight
months ago, and almost never went out. Two or three times somebody
took some suit-wearing fellas out for some sort of pleasure ride or
something. Out just a few hours, and then back to just sit there,
growin’ barnacles. Kinda a shame for such an expensive boat.

“Then these two thugs shows up one day,
maybe a month ago. They was dropped off by a motorboat. No name or
marking I could see, but it looked like a lighter off one a them
foreign freighters. These guys was worthless. They didn’t know an
anchor from an ostrich. Damn near hit three boats before they got
the thing out of the marina. I knew it when I saw the way they
handled that boat. I knew they would never get it back in one
piece. They didn’t. Come back later that morning with cracks in the
hull, leaking like a sieve, and just docked her and left her to
sink. They left on the same lighter that brung um. Nobody knew who
owned her, so I just called the Coast Guard and they hauled her off
to White’s.”

“What is White’s?”

“Old boatyard over in San Pedro. Real busy
when we had a fishing fleet. Now it’s more of a wreckin’ yard than
a boatyard.”

“These two men, can you describe them for
me?”

“Well, my eyes aren’t so good that I could
give you much of the fine detail, like eye color and such. I can
tell you they weren’t too tall, maybe five foot eight or nine. They
was all dressed up to be sailors, only they must a gotten their
ideas about sailors from old movies: bell-bottom trousers, watch
caps, and such. Looked pretty damn silly. I can tell you one thing,
though. They was Venezuelans.”

“Why are you so certain they were
Venezolanos?”

“Why, their accent, of course. Those
Venezuelans have a distinctive accent, completely different from
them other Spanish speakers. But then I can tell what country most
Spanish speakers are from. They most of them have their own little
differences, ya know. Strikes me like you know something about
their lingo too. That’s how they call themselves, they say
Venezolanos
, like that.”

Whoops. Maybe I underestimated this old man.
“You really are good with those accents. Did you notice anything
else about them? Did they take any cargo or anything on board?”

The old man started to laugh. “Yes, they did
take something aboard, and they probably managed to wreck that too.
Least ways they never brung it back.”

I knew the answer before I asked but had to
have him confirm it. “What was it they took and didn’t bring
back?”

“A bicycle.”

* * * * *

I had spent two years in Ciudad Piar,
Venezuela, while my dad consulted on a few problems at the iron
mine there, so I didn’t question the old man’s identification of a
Venezolano accent. Even though there were regional and social
variations, there were enough distinctive characteristics to make
it identifiable to someone with a good ear.

Putting the other pieces together with the
old man’s information, the picture seemed quite clear, but then
clear pictures are often drawn from potentially dangerous
assumptions. It looked like the boat owner, Deep Driller, Inc., was
based in Venezuela. A couple thugs from there were probably brought
onshore illegally and given the speedboat and orders to kidnap or
kill Evelyn. After their crime, they were taken right back to the
ship and returned to Venezuela. Police here wouldn’t have a prayer
of finding them. They never existed in this country. I decided
there was no point in even trying to find them, but I could still
check out the boat and the mailbox. The company had to have some
contact to handle things here in the States.

It was almost dark by the time I left the
marina and worked my way around San Pedro to White’s Boatyard. A
cold, wet onshore breeze greeted me as I stepped out of the car. I
grabbed my windbreaker, slipped my stun gun in the pocket, and
zipped up the jacket.

There was a two-story blue-and-white
building in the center of the yard, a blue wooden gate in front,
and a wire fence trimmed in barbed wire around the perimeter.
Starting at water’s edge on one side, I followed the perimeter
fence around the small peninsula to where it touched the water on
the other side. I decided the old man was right. “Wreckin’ yard”
was a better description, or maybe junkyard. Inside the fence was a
tangled collection of boats, boat parts, and machinery. Many of the
pieces of metal and wood defied my attempts to guess what they
were. One object, however, was easy to identify. Stacked among the
rubble was the speedboat that had been used in the attack on
Evelyn.

The sign on the gate said “closed”. I wasn’t
sure if it meant for today or forever, but I could see a light in
an upstairs room of the building. Thinking someone might be working
late or perhaps living here as a night watchman, I looked for a
bell or buzzer. At the gate was an old ship’s bell with a mallet
dangling by a rope. I picked up the mallet and gave the bell a
tentative tap. When that brought no response, I really let go and
pounded on the thing.

As the sound reverberated around the silent
peninsula, I looked to see if I had disturbed anyone else and
realized there was no one else to disturb. The only neighbors were
other junkyards filled with remnants of old conveyer belts that had
once been used to fill the freighters with bulk cargo in the days
before cargo containers. My ears still ringing, I felt like I had
triggered the alarm at the gate to Hades. With a growing sense of
apprehension, I had to control an urge to run to my car and get the
hell out of there. It was one of those eerie premonitions that
hindsight tells us we should have listened to.

Before I could consciously evaluate my
instincts, however, a light came on in one of the first-floor rooms
and the door opened. A huge bull mastiff lunged from the door and
took only five or six bounds before he hit the gate with such power
I was afraid the gate would break loose from its rickety supports
and topple right over.