Such thoughts bobbed like a buoy in my trained snoop’s mind as the couple sat at the counter and nibbled at their food. It was a meal any respectable young couple could down in a matter of minutes. But forty-five minutes later, the two were still sitting on those stools, sometimes picking at barely eaten, very cold-by-now food, often staring soulfully into each other’s eyes. Every other stool at that counter had seen at least three customer backsides in the same span.
I was long since used to boring stakeout duty; but it was unnerving having my subjects so near at hand, for so long a time. I finally got up and went to the men’s room, partly to test whether they’d use that opportunity to slip away (again, had they made me?), and partly because after three cups of coffee, I needed to take a piss.
When I got back, Bud and Louise were still sitting on their stools, Louise ever so barely swivelling on hers, like a kid in a soda shop. Frustrated, confused, I settled back into my booth, and glanced out the window, and the world exploded.
Actually, it was just the Mary E. that exploded, sending a fireball of flame rising from the cruiser, providing the clear night sky with thunder, hurling burning debris everywhere, making waves out of the placid waters, rocking the pier.
Rocking the cafe patrons, too, most of them anyway. Everyone except the employees leapt to their feet, screaming, shouting, running outside into a night turned orange by flame, dabbed gray by smoke.
Almost everyone-Bud and Louise were still just sitting at the counter, albeit looking out the window, numbly.
Me, I was on my leapt to but then I settled back into the booth, trying to absorb what I’d seen, what I was seeing. I knew my client was dead, and so was his wife-two people I’d spoken to at length, just the day before-as that cruiser was already a listing, smoking shambles, sinking stern first into the bay’s eighteen feet.
Finally, the couple headed outside, to join the gathering crowd at the water’s edge. I followed them. Sirens were cutting the air, getting closer, closer.
Louise was crying now, hysterical, going from one gaping spectator to another, saying, “My father was on that boat! My mother, too! Somebody save them-somebody rescue them…somebody has to rescue them!”
The boy friend remained at the side of the stricken girl as she moved through the crowd, making her presence blatantly known, Bud’s boyish face painted with dismay and shock and reflected flames.
I went to my rental car and got my Speed Graphic. I wouldn’t even need the flash-plenty of light.
Snagging shots of the dying boat, and the distraught daughter and her beau, I heard the speculation among the boating-wise onlookers, as to the explosion’s cause.
“Butane,” one would say.
“Or gasoline,” another would say.
But this ex-Marine wasn’t so easily fooled.
Butane, hell-I smelled dynamite.
Before long, the Coast Guard arrived, and fire trucks, and police from nearby Santa Ana and Orange County Sheriff’s Department personnel. The Chief of the Newport Beach Police showed, took over the investigation, questioned the tearful, apparently anguished Louise Overell and promptly released her, and her boy friend.
Pushing through the bustle, I introduced myself to the chief, whose name was Hodgkinson, and told him I was an investigator who’d been doing a job for Walter Overell.
“A job related to what happened here tonight?” the heavyset chief asked, frowning.
“Very possibly.”
“You suspect foul play?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Where are you staying, Mr. Heller?”
“The Beverly Hills Hotel.”
That impressed him-he didn’t realize it was a perk of my security work for the hotel. “Well, obviously, Mr. Heller, I’m gonna be tied up here quite a while. Can you come by the station tomorrow sometime? Tomorrow’s Sunday-make it Monday. And if I’m not there, I may be back out here.”
“Sure. Why did you let those two kids go?”
“Are you kiddin’? We’ll be dredging her parents’ scorched corpses outa the drink before too long. It’s only decent to spare that girl the sight of that.”
Only decent.
Sunday I took my wife to the beach at Santa Monica-she was only a few months pregnant and still looked great in a swim suit. Peggy was an actress and recently had a small role in a Bob Hope picture, and even out here her Deanna Durbin-ish good looks attracted attention.
She ragged me, a little, because I seemed preoccupied, and wasn’t terribly good company. But that was because I was thinking about the Overell “Yacht Murder” (as the papers had already starting calling it). I had sold my crime scene photos to Jim Richardson, at the Examiner, by the way, for three hundred bucks. I was coming out way ahead of the game, considering my client and his wife had been blown to smithereens the night before.
Call it guilt, call it conscience, call it sheer professionalism, but I knew I hadn’t finished this job. Walter Overell deserved more for that two-hundred buck retainer-just like he’d deserved better from that shrewd sexed-up daughter of his.
So on Monday, bright and early, looking like a tourist in sportshirt and chinos, I began looking. What was I looking for? A slip of paper…a slip of paper in the desert…sounds worse than a needle in a haystack, but it wasn’t. I found the damn thing before noon.
Chatsworth was a mountain-ringed hamlet in the West San Fernando Valley that used a Wild West motif to attract tourists, offering them horseback riding and hiking trails, with the ocean and beaches and desert close at hand for lovers of the outdoors-like that Boy Scout Bud Gollum and his bosomy Campfire Girl.
The guy behind the counter in the sparse storefront at the Trojan Powder Company looked a little like Gabby Hayes-white-bearded, prospector-grizzled, in a plaid shirt and bib overalls. But he had his original teeth and a faint British accent, which took him out of the running for playing a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry sidekick.
This was the owner of the place, and he was looking at the photo I’d handed him, taking a closer look than he had at the Illinois P.I. badge I’d flashed him.
“That young woman will never drown,” he said, with a faintly salacious smile.
“I’m not so much interested whether you recognize her tits as if her face is familiar-or her boyfriend’s.”
“I recognize the whole batch of them-both faces, both bosoms, for that matter. The girl didn’t come in, though-she sat out in their convertible-a Pontiac, I believe. I could see her right through the front window.”
“Did he make a purchase?”
“I should say-fifty sticks of dynamite.”
Jesus, that was a lot of dinah.
“This is fresh in my memory,” the proprietor said, “because it was just last Friday.”
Day before the boat blew up.
“Can anybody stroll in here and buy that stuff?”
“It’s a free country-but back in the early days of the war, when folks were afraid of saboteurs, city and county officials passed an ordinance, requiring purchasers to sign for what they buy.”
I liked the sound of that. “Can I see the signed receipt?”
Bud had not signed his own name-“R.L. Standish” had purchased the fifty sticks of dynamite-but I had no doubt handwriting experts would confirm this as the Boy Scout’s scrawl.
“Some officers from Newport Beach will be along to talk to you,” I told him.
“Fine-what about reporters?”
“Good idea,” I said, and used the phone.
Examiner editor Richardson paid me another C-note for the tip, and the proprietor of the Trojan Powder Company earned his own fifty bucks of Mr. Hearst’s money for providing the exclusive.
I found Chief Hodgkinson at the Newport Beach dock, where the grim, charred wreckage had been surfaced from the depth of eighteen feet-about all that remained was the black blistered hull. The sun was high and golden on the waters, and the idyllic setting of stucco villas in the background and expensive pleasure craft on either side was turned bizarre by the presence of the scorched husk of the Mary E.