The marina was almost deserted on this weekday morning. As I walked out toward Keller’s slip, all I heard were the cries of gulls and the creaks of the mooring hawsers. Then I heard another sound-the clink of a bottle against a glass.
Keller sat on a folding chair on the afterdeck of the cruiser. He wore cutoff jeans and no shirt, and his stomach sagged over his belt. When I came alongside the boat, he was setting a gin bottle down on the table next to him. He looked up at me, squinting and shading his eyes from the sun, then said, “Go away.”
I stepped on board anyway.
“You do as you please, don’t you?” He picked up his glass and drank off half the clear liquid.
“Most of the time.” I looked around and found another folding chair. Keller watched me set it up.
“I could throw you off of here.” But his words held no menace.
“You could, but you look like you might need some company.”
He shrugged. I sat down in the chair.
“How’d you know I was here?” he asked.
“I guessed, since this was where you and Jane used to go.”
He paused, glass halfway to his lips. “Somebody’s been talking. Who?”
“Nobody you know.”
“Not Ann Bates. She wouldn’t.”
“No, not Ann. Let’s just say I heard some gossip.”
“Yeah, sure. Everybody’s heard the gossip.” He drank, then added, “If you’re going to stay, at least have a drink.”
If that was what it would take to get him talking, I would. Besides, it was hot there in the sun. “I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one.”
“I think there are some in the fridge below.”
“Do you want me to get it?”
“No.” He stood up, went to the entrance to the cabin, and disappeared. In a minute or so he returned with a chilled Coors. He handed it to me and reached immediately for the gin bottle. From his speech and movements, Keller wasn’t drunk yet, but at this rate he soon would be.
“So you heard the gossip and came to hold my hand.” His expression was sardonic, mouth pulled down on one side.
“Her death was a bad shock, wasn’t it?”
“You could say that.”
“Why’d you lie to me about knowing her?”
“Why should I have gone into it? She wasn’t really missing-I knew that, and you knew it too because you’d talked to her mother.”
“You knew it because she was staying with you.”
He shook his head. “No. She wasn’t with me, at least not the whole week.”
“Where was she?”
His eyes left mine and flicked toward the bow. “She was elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now.”
“It may.”
“No.” He drank more gin. “Not now it doesn’t.”
“Why wasn’t she with you?”
“She needed privacy to do her research, and she didn’t want to involved me anyway.”
“What research?”
He made a motion with his hand, as if trying to erase his words.
“What kind of research?”
“Forget it.”
A telephone that sat on the deck next to the companionway door began ringing. Keller got up and answered it, standing with his back to me.
While he talked, I thought over my visit to his house. Keller probably was telling the truth about Jane not staying there, because he would not have admitted me so freely and let me stay so long if she were there or likely to return. But what about this “research?” What had she been-?
“I said, don’t worry about it!” Keller’s voice was suddenly loud. “They’ll turn up…No, I’m not coming in today… I don’t know when-For God’s sake, Ann, just hold things together there. Is that too much to ask? I’ll be in when I can.” He slammed the receiver into its cradle and strode back to his chair, his face mottled with anger.
“Ann Bates,” I said.
He glared at me. “You seem to know a great deal about my friends and associates.”
“I know Ann because I just came from The Tidepools. She was calling about the missing files, wasn’t she?”
He sighed and leaned forward, elbows on knees, head in hands. “The files are not missing, they’ve merely been misplaced. She’s making a big deal out of nothing. Jesus, why did I get up today? What the fuck is happening to me? When did it all get so out of control?”
I waited, but he just sat there, staring down at the desk. My beer can was empty, and the ice in his glass had melted. I stood up and said, “You can use a fresh drink; I’ll get some ice and another beer-”
He looked up quickly. “No, I’ll do it.” This time his steps were unsteady as he walked towards the companionway.
I waited until his head disappeared, then got up, and looked down there. I could see a small, compact galley, but that was all. I glanced down at the telephone at my feet and made a note of its number. By the time Keller returned, I was back in my deck chair.
“About that research of Jane’s…” I opened my beer and took a swallow.
Keller’s angry expression returned. “If you don’t want to get pitched over the side, drop it. I don’t even know why I’m letting you stay aboard.”
But I could guess; Keller wasn’t a man who could bear loneliness in the face of his loss. To prove it, he began to talk, his words slurring as they spilled out.
“But, then, I don’t know anything anymore. How do you know when your life gets out of control? There was a time when I thought I had it all and now I can’t even remember when that was. I was a doctor, a good doctor, and I was going to ease pain. I’d been to England, seen the work they were doing in the hospices there, and I’d inherited enough capital to start my own here. The Tidepools. Ease pain. Jesus.”
“But you do good work there.”
“Sure. Good work. And we take their money. Sometimes we even…Jesus.” He poured a full glass of gin and began in on it. “You know, it probably got out of control up there when I brought Ann in. She had a lot of ideas about making a profit and they sounded good, but what they did was bastardize the original concept. But the reason I brought her in and went for those ideas was because it had gotten out of control with me first. You know what I mean?”
“Sort of.”
“Cars. Country club. A house in the hills. This boat. The kind of women I chose. The things they wanted-Oriental carpets, sheets, towels, sterling silver. And each time one of them turned out that way, I’d choose another. Another with the same wants and needs. And me with mine, always looking to another woman for the solution. And then Janie.”
“Was she different?”
“Yes. She was different. She was willing to work for it all. When everything went to hell and it looked like I was going to lose the house and the cars and maybe even The Tidepools, she didn’t worry. She just went to San Francisco, said she’d find a way to buy us out of the trouble.”
“With a social worker’s salary?”
It was a mistake to have asked it. He frowned and set down his glass. “I’m talking too much. I always do when I drink. For that matter, I’m drinking too much. You’d better go.”
“No, what you’ve said is very interesting. It’s a real commentary on contemporary values-”
Keller stood up. “Like I said, you’d better go.”
I went. But at the other end of the parking lot, I stopped at the marina office. It was locked, and a sign indicated someone would be back at one-thirty. That might help me, if my plan worked at all. There was a phone booth outside the office, and I stepped in there, dug out a dime, and called the number of the phone on Keller’s boat. When he answered, I pitched my voice higher than usual and said, “Dr. Keller, this is Beth at the office.”