“The take-no-prisoners kind? The kind that uses fists and nightsticks instead of reason and common sense? I don’t think so, Strayhorn. Whatever you do for a living, I hope like hell it has nothing to do with law enforcement.”
“It doesn’t,” he said, and laughed again. Then, as I swung away from him, “Nice talking to you.”
“Yeah.”
He let me get out onto the rock again before he offered up his parting shot. “I still think you should’ve killed that fish,” he said.
He went off downstream without a backward glance. Leaving me to stand there with a sour taste in my mouth and nothing left of the good-to-be-alive feeling except a memory.
It was ten-thirty when I got to Judson’s. I parked in the lot and walked around to the gas dock with the five-gallon can I’d found in Zaleski’s boathouse and put in the car earlier. Hal Cantrell, the talkative glad-hander, was there ahead of me, pumping unleaded into the Johnson outboard on his rented skiff. He gave me a rueful smile as I came up.
“Man,” he said, “you see the gas prices here?”
“Not yet. Pretty stiff?”
“Three bucks a gallon.”
“Well, it’s a long haul in here from Quincy.”
“Still. Three bucks a gallon.” He shook his head. “Any luck out at Two Creek Bar?”
“Not much,” I said. I hadn’t done much more fishing after the episode with Strayhorn, and what little I’d indulged in had not produced another catch. Just as well. I’d probably feel like going out again tomorrow, but for today I had lost my taste for the sport. “How about you? Find a good spot?”
“Fair. Little inlet on the east shore. Don’t tell anybody, but I’m the lazy kind of fisherman. Rather find a shady spot on the lake, sit in a boat and drink beer for breakfast and contemplate my sins.”
“Doesn’t sound bad to me.”
“It’s not. I work hard enough at home — my wife sees to that. The one week a year she lets me off by myself, I take full advantage.”
“Where’s home?”
“Pacifica. Not far from your bailiwick.”
“I know it well.”
“Not a bad little town, but the fog gets to you after a while. That’s why I come up to the mountains on my fishing trips. I’m in real estate, by the way. I’d give you one of my cards, but I don’t suppose you’re in the market for coastal property?”
“Not right now. Someday, maybe.”
“Well, look me up if that day comes. San Mateo Coast Realty, Pacifica. Put you on to something nice and affordable.”
“I’ll remember that.”
He finished with his outboard, shut off the pump, and peered at the total. “Thirteen-sixty,” he said, shaking his head again. “Pay inside. Judson’s on the honor system.”
“Faith in his fellow man.”
“Wish I had it,” Cantrell said. “I’ll bet he gets underpaid or stiffed altogether more than a couple of times a season. At three bucks a gallon, I’m tempted to under-report myself.”
“But you won’t.”
“Nope. I’m not into petty crime.” A grin stretched the broad oval of his face. “The big stuff, now…”
“Big stuff?”
“You know, major scams. That’s what I’d get into. If you’re going to run a risk, you might as well do it for the biggest possible return.”
“And the biggest possible penalties.”
“If you get caught.”
“Most scam artists do.”
“But not all of them,” he said. “You don’t think I might’ve already taken the plunge, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”
Another grin; he put his right hand over his heart and said solemnly, “In the famous words of a famous man, T am not a crook.’ “
“A famous man who didn’t get away with it.”
“No? He got caught, sure, but then he was pardoned and handed plenty of money and a comfortable retirement and a library to house his papers, and when he died he was eulogized as a great statesman by a bunch of other statesmen who claimed they weren’t crooks, either. Who says crime doesn’t pay?”
Cantrell wandered off to pay his tab, and I thought as I unhooked the hose: Another strange bird. Deep Mountain Lake seemed to attract them; something in the thin air, maybe — a migratory lure similar to the smog or whatever atmospheric mixture brought wackos from all over the country flocking to L.A. I wondered how many more of the apparently well-wrapped folk I’d met last night would turn out to be flakes once I got to know them better. I wondered if Nils Ostergaard and Marian and Pat and even Chuck would turn out to be flakes. I wondered if I’d wound up at Deep Mountain Lake because I was a strange bird myself.
After that, I stopped wondering. There are some avenues of speculation that are better left barricaded with Do Not Enter signs.
From the notebooks of Donald Michael Latimer
Sun., June 30–12 noon
That private cop worries me.
I’m not sure why. He’s porky, he must be close to sixty, he moves as though he’d have trouble getting out of his own way, and he’s got a soft side, yet there’s something about him that makes me nervous. Something in his eyes. You look into them and you can see that he’s intelligent, good at what he does, but it’s more than that, it’s a kind of steel inside all that flab and sentimentality. Like the old cons in prison, the ones who’d seen it all and done it all that you didn’t dare provoke, no matter how frail they seemed. This one, this private cop, would make a deadly enemy.
I keep thinking about yesterday afternoon, when the kid found the boathouse padlock missing and first the cop and then old man Ostergaard started nosing around. They had no idea I was watching through my binoculars, anchored over on the far shore, but I can’t chance a regular surveillance or one of them is sure to become suspicious. The old codger worries me a little, too, but mainly it’s the private cop. He’s the one I’ve really got to watch out for.
Careful. Very careful from now on. I’m just another fisherman. Keep everybody thinking that, keep the stage set just as it is, and when Dixon shows next Tuesday or Wednesday it’ll be party time. A surprise blowout nobody around here will ever forget.
6
Tom Zaleski’s boat, like Tom Zaleski’s summer tenant, had seen better days. It was a twelve-foot aluminum skiff, dented on the starboard side and on the prow; but it didn’t seem to have any holes in its bottom, and when I floated it out alongside the dock and then stepped down gingerly into the stern, it wobbled and sank a few inches but stayed afloat. The ten-horsepower Johnson affixed to it was at least twenty years old; Zaleski seemed to have taken reasonably good care of it, though, and had thought to wrap it with plastic sheeting for the winter. A pair of emergency oars tucked under the seats looked as if they had been hand-carved in the days of King Arthur and then made the principal weapons in a series of violent jousting matches. I hoped I would not have occasion to use them.
I gassed the outboard, primed it, and yanked the starter rope. An emphysemic cough was all the response I got. I sat there in the hot midday sun and primed the thing twice more and yanked on the rope maybe fifteen times before it finally came alive in a chattering rumble, only to croak again four or five seconds later. Three more pulls resurrected it, and this time it clung precariously to life, hacking and wheezing all the while. I held its tiller for a minute or so, trying to decide if I really wanted to risk taking the old fart out onto all that bright blue water and having it expire on me once and for all somewhere in the middle. Well, what the hell. A little adventure is good for the soul, right?