"Jack Tagger from the Union-Register.We met at the church, remember?"
"Not really."
Jay Burns is wide and untapered, though not as tall as I am. He would have played middle linebacker in college, before all that lean meat went to lard.
"I'm doing a story about Jimmy. You said we could chat."
"Doubtful," he mumbles. "How the hell'd you find me?"
"Off the police report in Nassau. It listed this marina as your home address."
"Not for long," says Burns.
"It's a helluva nice boat," I say.
"Make an offer, sport. Cleo's selling."
"May I come in?"
"Whatever," he says indolently. Burns is so loaded that our brief chitchat has tired him out.
The cabin is a mess but at least it's air-conditioned. Using an empty Dewar's bottle as a probe, I clear a place for myself among the porn magazines and pizza boxes. Jay Burns sprawls on the floor with sunburned legs extended and his back propped against the door of the refrigerator. He relights a joint, and I'm not at all offended when he doesn't offer me a hit.
Breaking the ice in my usual smooth way, I say: "Hey, I was listening to Stomatoseon the way over. You played on a few of those cuts, right?"
Burns responds with a constipated sigh: "Jimmy asked me to."
"The notes said you co-wrote 'All Humped Out.' "
"That's right," he says with a sneer, "and I'm saving up the royalties to buy me a Mountain Dew."
I abandon bogus flattery as a strategy. "How old is the boat?"
"Four years. Five, I dunno." Jay Burns is barely glancing my way. The cabin air is severe with pepperoni and reefer.
"Cleo said you brought it across from the Bahamas by yourself."
"No biggie," he says.
"Where'd you learn to run blue water?"
"Hatteras. Where I grew up."
"Ever been through anything like this before?" I ask.
"Anything like what?"
"You know. The diving accident, losing your best friend"
Trailing blue smoke, Burns levers to his feet and lurches toward the head. "I gotta take a crap," he says, shedding a sandal en route.
I use the interlude to pluck from the galley stovetop the latest issues of Spinand Rolling Stone,both of which are open to obituaries of Jimmy Stoma. The articles are kindly written and differ little in the details of the drowning. Even Cleo Rio's words are practically the same. "Jimmy died doing what he loved best," she is quoted as saying in Spin.And in Rolling Stone:"Jimmy died doing what made him happiest."
Interestingly, there's no mention of her "wicked bad vibe" in advance of her husband's fatal dive. Perhaps because I'd braced her at the funeral, the widow Stomarti has omitted the tale of the tainted fish chowder. She has not, however, failed to plug her upcoming Shipwrecked Heartin both articles. I would have been flabbergasted if she hadn't. I also expected at least one of the magazines to get wind of Jimmy Stoma's unfinished solo project, yet there's not a word about thismaybe Cleo told them it wasn't true.
When Jay Burns finally emerges, unzipped and shoeless, I ask about Cleo's premonition on the day Jimmy Stoma died. Burns squints blearily. "You lost me on that one, sport."
"She told the New York Timesshe'd begged him not to make the dive. Said he'd gotten food poisoning and was in so much pain he could hardly put his tank on."
As stoned as he is, Burns still senses quicksand. "Cleo would know," he mumbles, "if anybody."
"Jimmy didn't say anything to you before he went in the water?"
"He wasn't no complainer. He coulda had a broken neck for all I know and he wouldn't of said word uno.That was Jimmy."
Burns is growing jittery. He spits his doobie and gropes over my head for a pack of Marlboros, stashed beside the CD player. He sucks down half a cigarette before speaking again.
"I'm fuckin' bushed, man."
"Got anything to drink?" I ask.
Burns stares heavily at me.
"Relax, Jay. I'll get it myself." I squeeze past him toward the refrigerator. The cabin is cramped and rank. A cold beer takes the sour burn out of my throat.
Burns says, "These questions, like I tole you, Cleo would be the one to say. She could help you."
"That wreck you guys were diving onwhat kind of plane was it? Cleo wasn't sure."
To signal his annoyance, Burns emits a rumbling gastric grunt. "DC-6," he says, cigarette bobbing.
"She said it was a drug plane."
"Twenty years ago, sport. Now it's Disneyland for lobsters." Burns is bracing himself upright on the cabin steps because he doesn't want to sit down again until I'm gone. He figures if he stands there long enough, I'll take the hint.
"Did you see Jimmy swimming around the wreck?"
"The plane's in pieces, man."
"Yes, Cleo told me. You didn't see Jimmy at all?"
Burns says, "We dove off the boat together. He went one way, I went the other."
"How was visibility?"
"Sucko. The wind blew twenty all night long so the bottom got churned to hell." Burns digs a beer from the refrigerator. From his body language it's obvious he's lost his patience, and possibly his temper.
For deterrence I take out my notebook, which Burns regards with a mixture of disgust and apprehension.
"Weird," I remark, as if to myself.
"What?" Burns strains to see what I'm writing.
"A twenty-knot wind all night long in August," I say. "Isn't that pretty unusual for the Bahamas?"
Jay Burns draws on his beer and shrugs.
"Yet it was glassy calm," I say, "the next day when you guys went out."
"That's the islands for ya."
"So the last time you saw Jimmy alive was right after you jumped in the water."
"The tail of the plane is, like, fifty yards from the nose section. Every now and then I could see bubbles but that was it. The bottom was all muddied up, like I tole you."
"Jay, what do you think happened down there?"
"Me?"
The telltale stall. Burns is trying to roust his brain and bear down. He's trying to avoid saying something that might contradict what he told the Bahamian authorities, or what Cleo told me. His fixed, furrowed expression is that of a drunk trying to wobble his way through a roadside sobriety test.
I nudge him along. "Jay, it's hard to understand. Jimmy was an experienced diver"
"What're you tryin' to say? Anybody can swim off and get lost. It happens," he says. "The cops in Nassau, they said they see it all the time. He coulda used up his tank and had a heart attack on the way to the top. Who knows."
"I suppose. But it just seems weird."
Burns scowls. "You fuckin' people are all alike. Stirring up shitJesus, a man's dead. My best friend! Cleo's husband! He's dead and here you're tryin' to make some goddamn mystery out of it, just to sell papers."
I should inform Mr. Burns that the days are long gone when headlines sold significant numbers of newspapers; that the serious money comes from home subscriptions, not rack sales. I should tell him that most of the shrill tabloids have died off, and that the predominant tone of modern American journalism is strenuously tepid and deferential.
But I can't explain any of this to Jay Burns because he's suddenly seized me in a clinch and we're caroming from one side of the cabin to the other, literally rocking the boat. He outweighs me by at least fifty pounds, but luckilybeing loaded to the gillshe is neither tireless nor exceptionally nimble. I still remember a few basic wrestling moves from high school and so, in two quick motions, I'm able to twist free and dump Jay Burns on his fat ass. Kicking out with both feet, he manages to nail me in the shins and I topple backward, snapping the door off the head.
Burns struggles to rise, making it all the way to one knee before I jump him. This time I drive an elbow into his nose and he stays down, slobbering blood like a gutshot boar. I sprawl on his chest, plant a knee in his groin and pin both arms over his head.
Lowering my face to his, I say: "Oh, Jay?"
"Huhhggnn."