Choke (13 page)

Chuck furrowed his brow. “Such as?”

“Tell me again, how long were you in the engine room?”

“Eight, ten minutes.”

“Clare said it was more like forty-five minutes.”

Chuck’s eyes widened. “That’s ridiculous; it was a simple job, and it didn’t take anywhere near that long.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Something else: Clare says you handed Harry the red tank and her the yellow tank and chose the blue one for yourself.”

“Not true. Clare told me to use the blue tank; she said it was the guest tank!”

Tommy nodded slowly. Then he produced a plastic bag from his pocket and held it up for Chuck to see. Inside was a twelve-inch length of clear plastic pipe. “Chuck,” Tommy said, “have you ever seen this before?”

C
huck stared at the plastic pipe as if it were a poisonous reptile. “Yeah, I guess I’ve seen several thousand feet of that kind of tubing in my time. It’s used a lot on boats.”

“I don’t mean this kind of pipe in general,” Tommy said. “I mean this piece of pipe in particular.”

He didn’t at all like where this was headed. “I don’t know how to tell that piece of pipe from other pieces of the same pipe,” Chuck said. “What’s going on, Tommy?”

“Chuck, I think we’ve established that you’re pretty handy on a boat, or with anything mechanical. Would you say that’s a fair judgment?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What’s your point?”

“My point is that Harry Carras wasn’t handy at all with mechanical things, that he never did his own work on his boat, that he didn’t know how machinery worked. But you do.”

“I guess I’m a little slow, Tommy. Why don’t you just spell it out?” Chuck braced himself.

“Well, it started with the lieutenant on the Coast Guard cutter. After arriving aboard
Fugitive
he went below to the engine room, and he found this piece of plastic pipe on the floor, right next to the air compressor.”

“So?”

“He also didn’t find any safety wire on the hose clips securing the exhaust pipe.”

“That’s crazy; I’d put it on there less than an hour before. Safety wire doesn’t just come off by itself.”

“Never mind that; let me go on with the lieutenant’s theory.”

“What theory?”

“Listen to me, Chuck,” Tommy said. “The lieutenant thinks that this piece of tubing might have been used to join two larger pieces of hose together. Could that be?”

“Well, if they were the right diameter, you could put each end of the smaller tubing into a piece of larger tubing and extend the length a few inches.”

“Let me ask your opinion on this,” Tommy said. “Could this piece of tubing have been used to join together the exhaust hose from an engine with the intake hose of the air compressor?”

Chuck’s jaw fell, and he didn’t speak.

“Chuck? What’s your opinion of that possibility?”

Chuck swallowed hard. “You think I did that, Tommy?” he asked.

“I just want your opinion, Chuck. Could you join those two pieces of equipment together like the lieutenant thinks?”

“Yes, you could. Assuming the different hoses were the right diameters. Is that what happened, Tommy? Did somebody deliberately charge our tanks with exhaust from an engine?”

Tommy leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. “We had the air in the tanks analyzed. Two of the tanks had enough carbon monoxide in them to kill in a matter of minutes; the third tank was contaminated, too, but not enough to kill in such a short time, just enough to make whoever breathed it sick after a few minutes.”

Chuck stared at the detective. “And the third tank was the blue one, my tank?”

“That’s right, Chuck. Do you see where I’m headed here?”

Chuck nodded. “I’m afraid I do.”

“Help me out, here, Chuck; show me how you couldn’t have done this.”

“Maybe Harry was running the engine and the compressor at the same time, and the compressor intake sucked in the exhaust from the engines.”

“Nice try, but the exhaust pipes are on the stern of the boat, and the intake for the compressor is around on the starboard side, well away from the exhaust.”

“I was only below for ten minutes,” Chuck replied. “That wasn’t enough time to connect the engine to the compressor and fill the three tanks.”

“The lady says you were below for forty-five minutes.”

“That’s not true, but even if it were, the engines weren’t running.”

Tommy raised a finger. “Good point. I need some more points like that, Chuck. How long would it take to fill three tanks like that?”

“I don’t know, without knowing the output of the compressor. Certainly it was smaller than the ones you’d see at a dive shop, where they’re filling dozens of tanks a day.”

Tommy turned to Daryl. “Make a note of that; I want to know the output of Carras’s compressor and how long it would take to fill three tanks.” Tommy then turned and pointed to the marina across the bight. “Chuck, how far do you figure it is from here to
Fugitive’s
berth over there?”

“I don’t know, maybe a hundred and fifty yards.”

“You a good swimmer Chuck? Could you swim over there, at night maybe, and fill those tanks?”

“I’d have to start
Fugitive
’s engines to do that,” Chuck replied. “That would get noticed at night. Security’s pretty good over there.”

“Another good point,” Tommy said. “Keep ‘em coming.”

“All I can do is tell you the truth, Tommy.”

“So far you haven’t told me the whole truth, have you, Chuck?”

“What do you mean?”

“When the three of you were cruising out to that wreck, what did you and Clare Carras talk about?”

“I’ve told you.”

“Yeah, but Clare has told us something different.”

“Told you what?”

“Chuck, how long has the affair been going on?”

Chuck looked back and forth at the two detectives. “What did Clare say we talked about?”

“She said she told you she was breaking it off, that she loved Harry, and that even though he was impotent, she didn’t want to leave him for you.” Tommy leaned forward. “Is that your recollection, Chuck?”

Chuck sighed. “Just the opposite, Tommy. I told her
I
was breaking it off.”

“How long had it been going on?”

“Almost from the moment I met her,” Chuck replied.

“How often were you seeing her?”

“Two or three times a week; whenever Harry was out of town on business.”

“Did you take her up to Little Palm Island, so you could spend a whole night with her?”

“She
invited
me.
I’d never even heard of the place. I met her up there, and we spent the one night together.”

“Why did you want to break it off with Clare?”

“Because I’d met a girl I thought I could fall in love with.”

“What’s her name?”

“Meg Hailey. She lives right over there.” He turned and pointed at the empty berth. “At least, she did.”

“She lived on a boat?”

“Yes.”

“So Where’s the boat?”

“I don’t know. When I came back here yesterday, she had sailed.” “The boat or the girl?”

“Both. She and her brother, Dan, lived aboard.”

“I’d sure like to talk to Meg,” Tommy said.

“So would I.”

“Chuck, that night up at Little Palm Island, did you ask Clare to leave Harry for you?”

“I did
not;
that never crossed my mind. The thing with Clare was just …”

“Recreational?”

“I guess you could say that,” Chuck replied. “It was for the sex; nothing else.”

“That’s not the way Clare saw it,” Tommy said.

“How did she see it? Tell me.”

“Clare says she was in love with you, that you had manipulated her into talking about her leaving Harry.”

“Tommy, that’s just nuts. Harry was a rich man; I’m a teaching tennis pro, for God’s sake. In a great year I might make seventy-five grand. That wouldn’t keep Clare in earrings.”

Tommy sat back again. “I guess not,” he said. “Not without Harry’s money, anyway.”

All three men were quiet for a moment.

“Tommy,” Chuck said finally, “do I need a lawyer?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Tommy replied.

D
aryl was quiet until they were in the car. “So why didn’t you bust him?” he asked Tommy. “This is a quiz, Daryl,” Tommy replied, exasperated. “Why didn’t I bust him?”

“Because you don’t have enough evidence?”

“You get an A.”

“You’ve got motive and opportunity,” Daryl said.

“Motive, maybe; opportunity, maybe. If you buy Clare Carras’s end of what happened.”

“What do you mean, maybe? He wanted Clare and Harry’s money—that’s motive; he spent forty-five minutes down in that engine room doing a ten-minute job, that’s opportunity. Or maybe he fixed the tanks at night, like you suggested.”

“You’re buying Clare’s story, then?”

“It makes more sense than Chuck’s.”

“I’ll give you that much,” Tommy said. “But he might have an alibi, if the girlfriend turned up.”

“Even if we found her today, that wouldn’t stand up for an alibi.”

“Why not, Daryl?”

“He could say to—what’s her name?”

“Meg.”

“Meg. He could say to her that he’s breaking up with Clare, right? That doesn’t mean he actually does it; he could just be covering his ass.”

“Look at it this way, Daryl,” Tommy said patiently. “Let me give you three possible scenarios, just for a start: One, Chuck wants Clare and her husband’s money, so he knocks off Harry; two, Clare wants Harry’s money, so she sets up Chuck for the murder; three, Chuck and Clare are in it together.”

“And which one do you buy?”

“At the moment, I’m leaning a little bit toward they’re in it together.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ve both got something to gain.”

“But they’ve forgotten something,” Daryl said.

“What’s that?”

“In order to make this thing with the tanks work, they’ve got to give us somebody else who’d look good for the murderer, somebody else who’d want Harry dead.”

“Daryl, try to think back as far as the exploding yacht, which was just like Harry’s; try to remember the punctured brake line in the Mercedes, which was
actually
Harry’s. Does your memory go back that far?”

“Oh, yeah,” Daryl said.

“Here’s a fourth scenario: Somebody hates Harry. Maybe Harry stole from him; maybe he came out on the short end of a business deal with Harry. Whatever. Anyway, he decides he’d be a much happier person if Harry stopped living. He tries twice and fails, then he gets lucky, and Harry is fish food.”

“A possibility, I guess,” Daryl admitted. “And a pretty good one.”

“Let me give you another possibility, a fifth scenario: Clare is having it off with a third, no, a fourth party, Mister X. She and Mister X want Harry unbreathing, so they knock him off and set up Chuck for the deed.”

“I guess that’s a pretty good possibility.”

“Damn right it is; that’s what’s driving me crazy.”

“Why?”

“We’ve got five pretty good possibilities; that’s too many. Murder is usually simpler than that; you don’t usually get multiple choices, not sensible ones, anyway.”

“I never thought of murder being simple, I guess.”

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is. Fred loves Sally, kills Sally’s husband—or swap the genders; wife hates husband who made her life miserable, puts butcher knife in throat while he’s sleeping; jerk owes shark money, won’t pay, shark kills him as an example to his other debtors; kid hates dad, wants to inherit his money. Or, most common of all, Joe and Al have a few too many and remember how much they hate each other, so they slug it out in the alley, and one of them forgets to mention he has a knife. Those are your typical murder scenarios, and there are a lot more, but for the most part, they’re simple.”

“And this one’s complicated.”

“Very.”

“So what do you do when it’s complicated?”

“You run down
all
the possibilities, or at least you keep all of ‘em in mind while you’re working on the most promising.”

“And the most promising is that Chuck and Clare are in it together?”

“Technically, yes. But my gut is having trouble with that one.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I’m letting my feelings get in the way.”

“What feelings?”

“I like Chuck; I think he’s a nice guy.”

“And nice guys never murder anybody?”

“It’s not just that. When I listen to Chuck talk I think I hear the truth.”

“Because you like him?”

“Maybe. Or maybe because he’s telling the truth. I don’t know, I may be letting what I think of him get in the way of what I think of his story.”

“Something bothers me about the two of them being in it together,” Daryl said.

“Tell me.”

“If they’re in it together, why is Clare’s story different from Chuck’s? I mean, if it’s their plan together, then Clare must have had second thoughts and is trying to nail Chuck. Problem with that is, she’s bound to know that if she tries to nail him, he sucks her into it, right?”

“Daryl, I have hopes for you,” Tommy said.

Daryl beamed. “I mean, we’re talking human nature here, right?”

“Right, Daryl. If Chuck is after Clare and Harry’s money, he wouldn’t try to suck in Clare, unless she started it.”

“I think I like the Clare option, that Clare has engineered it and is setting up Chuck.”

“Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind seeing it come out that way. Of course, the world would be poorer for the loss of the Clare Carras body.”

“Yeah, I would have liked to have a crack at that body,” Daryl said.

Tommy burst out laughing. “Daryl, I like your ambition, but the odds are, you are never going to have a crack at something like Clare Carras, not in your whole life.”

“And why the hell not?” Daryl demanded, sounding hurt.

“Because it is a universal truth that women who look like Clare Carras always end up with men like Harry—older, rich, and very, very generous. A cop could never in his whole life put together enough money to get a sideways glance from something like Clare Carras. So save your fantasies of Clare Carras for nights alone between the sheets and a bottle of hand lotion at your side.”