Wrong Place, Wrong Time Read online

  I’d decided on Budweiser for my next beer of the week, partly because I liked the label. I know that’s a stupid reason to select a beer, but there you go. Advertising legends have been built on flimsier foundations.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Luis Ortega moved into your rental room upstairs because he was kicked out by his girlfriend, Maria. A friend of hers saw Luis getting it on with one of your clients.”

  Larry Davis frowned and opened another Bud. He didn't seem too worried about body mass today. He said, “On LA Law don’t they call that hearsay evidence?”

  “Shut up with the legal crap. I’m expounding a theory here. Now, the point is this: Luis thought he was a cocksman. Remember the underwear trophies in his closet? So maybe he came on to the wrong woman one day. No, wait a minute, make that the right woman married to the wrong guy. Because this guy, when he found out, didn’t do the normal things. He didn’t yell at the wife or say ‘Hey, now I can screw around, too,’ or find a marriage counselor or get drunk and punch out Luis’s lights. Instead he got mad. He got bad mad. He hung back and followed Luis and learned where he could find him. Finally, when he was ready—presumably when he had set up a good alibi elsewhere—he came around, conned me right out of my socks, and whammo! Bye-bye, Luis.”

  “Whew,” Larry said. “You sure do work at it, don’t you?”

  “And I’m not finished yet. Sub-point A. The fake bounty hunter who actually made the hit might not be the husband. He could have been a hired hand.”

  “Am I wrong or would that complicate things even more?” Larry asked.

  I sighed and drank beer. “Damned if I know. In some ways, maybe it would. But in others … Look, how many guys could—not would, but could—find a hired killer? Hopefully, a guy like that would stand out. He’d be connected, he’d have a record, things like that.” I said all that with much more confidence than I felt.

  Larry said, “Maybe so, but then he’d be harder to crack. A person like that wouldn’t exactly collapse in remorse and tell all, would he?”

  “I’m trying not to think about that part,” I said.

  “Keep trying. So what do you want from me?”

  “A list of the people whose pools Luis cleaned in the past, oh, say, two months?”

  Larry nodded. “No problem. At least, it’s not a problem for me. Might be for you, though. There’s gonna be a hundred or so names on that list.”

  “Individual calls, maybe. But won’t a lot of them be repeats?”

  “Not as many as you’d think. Betcha it’s over eighty names,” he said.

  “Eighty?”

  “Luis was part-time, like you said. He didn’t have a regular service run; he just did whatever was on the board when he came in.”

  “Wonderful.” I got us each another beer.

  “The accountant comes Monday,” Larry said, “So we’ll be into the books, anyway. You need the list any sooner than that?”

  “I wish I did, but no, that’s fine,” I said. “There’s no shortage of loose ends I still have to run down. I want to check the girlfriend’s family, a possible gambling angle, stuff like that.”

  “Must be jest excitin’ as all get-out being a honky private in-vestigator.” He took a long pull at his beer and said solemnly, “You get to thump uppity niggers much?”

  “It varies from week to week,” I said. “Right now I’m working on a local government case. Some black dude running a business out of his house. But, hell, I don’t think he’s a real honest-to-god black. Probably got a name like Muhadje el-Khumquad. I think he’s a Libyan terrorist.”

  Larry shook his head sadly. “Hey, man, don’t even say that kind of thing out loud. Those clowns from the council hear that, they’ll believe it.”

  Chapter 20

  Saturday morning Hilda and I went for a drive. We took her car because the BMW’s radio worked. We were planning to make a full day of it. Drive, talk, brunch with the beautiful people, and maybe later go out to White Rock Lake for the dinghy races.

  But first I wanted to check on Thorney.

  “Five minutes, that’s all, babe,” I said to Hilda.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  Thorney hadn’t seen the vandals since Thursday, when we had rousted the Gortner and Wisermann boys. He told me in a distracted way, mostly because he was staring at Hilda, who looked terrific as usual.

  “Hey, I’m over here,” I said to Thorney. “Gawk at me while you tell me about your call from Gortner’s goons.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and slicked down his hair with a big hand. “Well, yesterday morning, this young fellow came to the door. Smiled all the time and said he worked for that Gortner boy’s grandfather. I didn’t trust him for one minute. He reminded me of an old Australian saying, what was it, oh, right, ‘flash as a rat with a gold tooth.’” Thorney nodded happily. “I haven’t thought of that for years, but it sure fits that fellow. He was a rat with a gold tooth, all right.”

  That had to be Rod Cayman.

  “Was there another man with him?” I said. “Big guy, a boxer?”

  Thorney shrugged. “There was someone in the car, out at the curb. He never got out. Anyway, the rat fellow carried on about me signing something and getting fifty dollars for my trouble.”

  Hilda bristled. “You didn’t …?”

  Thorney laughed, a big booming roar that filled the old house.

  “Never,” he said. “I told him to get off my property. He got kind of smart-alecky then, and he said who’s going to make me, and I said me and Rafferty. He said who’s Rafferty and I told him. Why?”

  I explained about Rod Cayman and Dave and Judge Gortner and how I hoped I’d done some good but halfway doubted it.

  Thorney grinned widely. “Well, now, sonny-boy, you said when those kids knew you were hanging around, they might stop. Didn’t figure they’d go running for their poppa, huh?” He laughed again, another rolling boomer that became infectious.

  While Hilda strolled around Thorney’s living room, looking at mementos, Thorney pulled me aside. “What’s the story here?” he asked. “You two are married, but she still uses her old name?”

  “We’re not married.”

  Thorney frowned and pursed his lips. I think he disapproved. Hilda turned then and asked him about an old medal in a glass frame. Within ten seconds Thorney was grinning foolishly, basking in the sun of Hilda’s presence.

  Most of us did.

  Before long Hilda and I had been there for an hour. My “five minute” stop had turned into a combined nostalgia trip and navigation lesson. Any chance of brunch in yuppie heaven grew slimmer by the second. Hilda was a great sport about it.

  Thorney got out his sextant and went over the parts and adjustments again. I remembered most of them. Then he led us out to the backyard, found a sunny spot, and handed me the sextant. “There’s nothing mysterious about this,” he said. “You measure the angle between the horizon and the sun, stars, moon, whatever, then look up the numbers in the books.”

  Dallas backyards being notoriously short of sea horizons, Thorney poured oil into a flat pan. He said the oil, being liquid and shiny, would make a “flat to the world” mirror. I could use the sun’s reflection in the oil exactly like a sea horizon, as long as I divided the sextant angle by two and—well, Thorney understood how it worked.

  He saved my right eye by reminding me to use the sextant filters, then waited patiently while I fumbled through a long series of wobbly sights.

  Back inside he averaged the sights into one potentially workable one, looked up this and added that, and finally drew a position line on a printed form he called a “plotting sheet.”

  “Now what?” Hilda asked. “Don’t you have to put that on a map?”

  “Chart,” Thorney and I said simultaneously.

  “Picky, picky,” Hilda said.

  Thorney said, “Not really. I can mark where we are on the plotting sheet.”

  He did. The X he drew was quite a way from my position line. “Well, it�
��ll come,” he said. “Sixty-five miles off isn’t bad for the first try.”

  Hell with him. I thought it was wonderful.

  “Hil, babe, isn’t that amazing? Finding where you are, where you’re going, with only—”

  Hilda looked wary. “Are you working up to one of those male honor-code things?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But now that you mention it, if you consider—”

  Hilda pointed to a group of wavy printed lines in the corner of the plotting sheet. “What’s this funny-looking thing?” she said oh-so-brightly. Hilda could deliver the fastest non sequiturs in the west. She sometimes called the process “hiding Rafferty’s soapbox.”

  At twelve-thirty, we made a big platter of grilled cheese sandwiches and ate them while going through Thorney’s memorabilia. Memorabilia, hell, the man was a walking museum. Periodically he’d drag out another batch of treasures.

  Thorney had been everywhere and done everything. He was an oil-company rep in Mexico during the revolution in the late twenties. He had geological reports, and photos of swarthy men with bandito mustaches and huge sombreros, and a moldy old serape that made Hilda sneeze until he put it away.

  He had joined the merchant marine in the thirties and later sailed on World War II convoys to England and Murmansk. After the war, he and five others bought a boat and sailed it from California to Australia, then went into the desert to mine opals.

  For me, those nautical bits and pieces were the most intriguing. Thorney’s large dining-room table slowly disappeared under a pile of old charts, yellowed plotting sheets, and shippy gadgets like parallel rules and curved brass dividers. There was a shoebox of old boat photos, too. Thorney pulled out a handful and showed them to Hilda and me.

  “That’s her,” he said. “The Rosinante. Forty-four feet overall. Built in Boston in 1911.”

  It was the ship I’d seen in the picture on Thorney’s living-room wall. “Gaff ketch,” I said for Hilda’s benefit.

  “Gesundheit,” she said.

  “You’ll have to make allowances,” I said to Thorney. “She doesn’t speak boat.”

  At the bottom of a mildewed briefcase, Thorney found a letter-sized envelope with a penciled date on it. He opened it and grinned.

  “Well, I’ll be … I thought I’d lost this.” There was a navigation form in the envelope. Thorney smoothed it out on the tabletop.

  The printed form had room to calculate the two different sextant sights needed to determine a ship’s position. Both parts of the form had been filled out. The writing was readable but not very neat. A few figures had been Xed out, there were scribbled notes in the margins, and there was a coffee-cup stain in the upper right corner. Across the top in broad, smeary pencil strokes, someone had written BOUNTY?

  Thorney sat with one hand on the old paper and looked past me at something or nothing. “We sailed from Long Beach, like I told you, down to the Galapagos Islands, then through the Marquesas and Tuamotus to Tahiti. From there we headed west, toward Australia. One day, a couple of months later, I took these star sights at dusk, worked them up, and plotted our position, just like every other night. Then I crawled into my bunk.”

  He unfolded one corner of the form that had been bent over and carefully smoothed it, pressing it slowly against the tabletop with his big right hand. “I couldn’t get to sleep, though, because something was bothering me. Then bingo! it hit me. We were abeam Tonga that night—that’s about halfway between Tahiti and Australia—and almost exactly where the Bounty crew mutinied.”

  I said, “Damn. Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian? Seriously?”

  Thorney nodded. “I was almost certain at the time that it was the place. I kept this and checked the history books later.” He held up the form. “We passed right over the spot an hour after I took these sights.” He grinned a little sheepishly. “I spent most of that night on deck, thinking about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hilda said. “I think I saw the movie, but I don’t …”

  Thorney and I looked at each other. He waved at me to go ahead. “Hollywood made Bligh into a monster, Hil. Most people don’t realize what a great sailor he really was.” I had to stop and think for a moment. Thorney nodded encouragement.

  “Okay, I remember now. They kicked Bligh off the ship. Some of the crew chose to go with him, though. Fifteen or twenty, I’m not sure exactly. They had some food and water, though not much. And they stopped somewhere, but … help, Thorney.”

  “They went ashore for water,” Thorney said. “On one of the small islands near Tonga. Natives attacked them and killed one man, so Bligh ordered the lifeboat back to sea. You go on now,” he said to me. “You’re doing fine.”

  “Okay. So there they were. It was an open boat; they were short on food, and this was, oh, 1790 or thereabouts. Club Med hadn’t discovered the South Pacific market then. The natives were, as they say, restless. There was no safe place to stop so they didn’t. They sailed that overgrown rowboat more than three thousand miles—”

  “Four thousand miles,” Thorney said. “To Timor in New Guinea.”

  “And they all made it. That’s right, isn’t it? There were no further casualties?”

  “That’s right.”

  I said to Hilda, “That was probably the most significant small boat voyage in the last three hundred years. And Thorney sailed over the very spot where it began. Imagine the feeling of being there, the link with the past. I’m jealous as hell.”

  Thorney smiled. “It was good.”

  “Some guys have all the fun,” I said. “Would you consider adopting me?”

  Chapter 21

  Sunday morning. Early. Early early, in fact, when there’s only the smallest gray hint in the sky to tell you another day will be along soon now, if you can just hang on for a little while longer.

  I read somewhere that if hospital patients made it to this point they were likely to make it through the whole day; the lonely dark hours were the dying time.

  Perhaps the rising sun cheered the hell out of hospital patients but it didn’t do much for me. I sighed and rolled over for the seven hundredth time.

  Hilda squirmed beside me and moved a smooth, sleep-heated arm across my chest. She pushed her forehead against my shoulder. Her forehead was hot, too.

  “Sorry, babe,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  I dozed off, too, off and on, mostly off.

  An hour later, it was still early, but bright outside. I was on my back, counting the little diamond patterns in Hilda’s bedroom drapes when she woke up.

  “Um, good morning, big guy,” she said, and grinned cheerfully. Just like that. Boom. Asleep, then awake. Amazing.

  “Hi, babe.”

  Hilda scratched her black mop of hair, then stretched lazily. “You didn’t sleep very well, did you?”

  “No problem.”

  “Uh huh. What kept you awake? Cats fighting? The bed too hot?” She lurched up onto one elbow and leaned over to rub her nose against mine. “Or deep, dark, heavy thoughts?”

  I sighed and grinned. Well, I sort of grinned. “Dark, heavy thoughts, I guess. I think I’m having a midlife crisis. Bet you didn’t know I spoke yuppie.”

  “Well, first of all,” Hilda said, “I don’t go along with this ‘midlife’ business. Let’s see now, for at least a quarter of my life so far, I was a little kid. Then there was a long spell as a teenager. Part of that was good, but part of it—yuck! Anyway, that’s half or more of my life to date gone right there. I figure what counts now is my adult life. I may already have some of that behind me, but I’ll tell you what; I’m just getting warmed up good.”

  She smiled and playfully screwed a fingernail an inch deep into my side. “And, my fierce and scowling true love, so are you.”

  “Well, sure,” I said, “but what if you run out of time to do all the things you want to do? And don’t forget, babe, everyone slows down eventually.”

  Hilda nodded seriously. “Even Thorney.”

  “That’s ri
ght. Of course, he hasn’t slowed down very damned much for a man his age, but still … Besides, he already got to—oomph!”

  That time she used her fist instead of a fingernail, and she gave me a good shot in the ribs. “Rafferty, you’re jealous! Of Thorney!” She shook her head, her eyes wide. “I can’t believe this. You, the guy who … Rafferty, don’t you understand—I mean really understand—that you’ve already done things other people would give their …” Hilda smiled at me the way mothers smile at children planning careers as space rangers. “I love you,” she said.

  Then she sat up and put her hand lightly on my chest. “You’re only feeling what everyone feels eventually, especially men. Rafferty, the truth is that you’re never going to sail off on a grand adventure to an idyllic South Sea island. You have to face that.” She smiled again. “It’s called growing up.”

  “I’ve heard about that,” I said, “but I’m not quite ready for it.”

  “I know, dear, and I’m glad. I think.”

  Later on that morning, we sat at Hilda’s breakfast counter drinking coffee, eating doughnuts, and idly watching Sunday Today on the little kitchen TV set.

  “There,” I said, pointing. “Did you see that? She crinkled again.”

  “Missed it,” Hilda said. “Damn.”

  “You’d see it if you hadn’t bet me she didn’t do it. I tell you Maria Shriver crinkles her nose just before the commercials.” I reached out and poured us both more coffee. “She does have a dynamite jawline, though. Gotta give her that.”

  “Maybe she’s a preppie,” Hilda said. “A preppie might crinkle her nose.”

  “Naw,” I said. “Preppies have names like Buffy or Muffin. Who ever heard of a preppie named Maria?”

  “Who, indeed? Hey, big guy, are you working today?”