Rogue Wave (11 page)

“We only know he went over near the Farallons. What makes you think
she
did?”

“She didn’t have time to call for help. No one heard a call.”

Kiernan raised a palm. “No, what we know is that she didn’t call for help, not necessarily that she couldn’t. Why would Delaney’s body be on the Farallons, the boat have washed ashore south of the city and Robin Matucci’s body be nowhere around?”

He banged the mug down. Coffee spilled in all directions. “Because Delaney was a drunk. Jesus! I could have told her that. Yeah, he swore he’d been dry for years. And then what do I hear but that the guy’s got enough liquor in him for New Year’s Eve. If he’d stayed sober, maybe they’d both still be alive.” He reached behind him for a rag.

“Why’d Robin hire him? Shouldn’t she have known better?”

“Yeah, well,” he said, mopping up the coffee, “Robin was sharp as they come dealing with city inspectors, and suppliers. She could scotch a fight on board
Early Bird
before the second guy realized he was being baited. But, damn, she was one pushover for half-assed deckhands.” He flung the sopping rag into the sink behind him.

“How come?”

“Got me,” he mumbled, his voice unsteady. “You can work with a bad deckhand, but it makes your job twice as hard. The worst deckhands are the ones who can’t deal with people. They make their money in tips, so that kind don’t last. And that wasn’t the problem with Robin’s guys. They were …” He fingered his beard. “Well, deckhand is not a career position. The biggest problem is guys who don’t show up one morning and leave you shorthanded. The guys Robin took on, they couldn’t get the hang of things. She used to laugh about it. Said when they were baiting a hook they were working to capacity.”

“And was Delaney like that?”

Pedersen spun his mug around thoughtfully. “No, he wasn’t dumb. Unless you call getting so drunk you can’t stand on deck dumb. Dead dumb. And he never did that till that last day. There was no way she could have known he’d fall apart like that. No way any of us could have warned her. No one on the dock ever saw him drunk.”

“How long had he worked for her?”

“I don’t know. A month maybe.”

“Did he work for anyone else?”

“No. Robin was the top of the heap.”

The sea lion had moved closer, barking impatiently. On the dock more voices called back and forth, buckets and chains clanked more insistently. Feet slapped the ladder beside the boat and a lanky man stepped on board, hauling two buckets after him. Pedersen glanced at him, then at his watch. To Kiernan, he said, “I have to get moving. But look, if there’s anything funny about Robin’s death, I want to know.”

Kiernan nodded. “And, I can take it, you’ll help me however you can?”

“Right.”

“Okay, who was her closest friend?”

“Girlfriends? Not many women here. Sometimes her sister’d meet her across the street, but she never came on the dock, just waited over there. Then they’d go get Robin’s car and drive off in that red car with their red hair flowing out behind them.” He swallowed hard.

“Where does this sister live?”

“Don’t know. Never met her. For some reason Robin never wanted to talk about her.”

Odd, Kiernan thought, but there was no time to press him for speculation. “What about friends here, on the dock?”

“Everyone liked Robin. She was everyone’s friend.”

“Including the deckhands?” Kiernan asked skeptically. Nobody is everyone’s friend.

“Oh, yeah. She started as a hand herself. It’s not easy for a woman. Back-breaking work, you leave here at six. You’ve got guys tanked up by the middle of the day. If they don’t catch anything, they’re hauling off at their neighbor. If they do, they’re celebrating by grabbing ass. Keeps a woman deckhand on her toes.” He laughed. “Robin told me that was the joy of being captain, when things got bad she had the wheelhouse to keep her butt in.”

The lanky man stuck his head in the cabin. “I got three quarters worth of bait. That okay?”

Pedersen looked at his clipboard. “Plenty.”

“Time to find Harpoon, huh?”

“Time to check the damn poles. Go on,” he snapped.

The deckhand shrugged off Pedersen’s anger and stomped to the stern. Pedersen turned back to Kiernan. “Okay, detective, your ten minutes are up.”

Kiernan downed the dregs of her coffee. What was the significance of this particular Harpoon, and why had the mention of it gotten to Pedersen? A look at him told her she’d fare no better than the deckhand with that line of questioning. Instead, she said, “But if Robin was as careful as you say, why didn’t she hire more than one deckhand?”

“Early Bird
was smaller than the
Dream.
A helluva lot more elegant. Going out in
Early Bird
was like sitting in the front parlor. Robin took corporate groups, maybe only five or six guys. Corporation pays as much as twenty guys do. Lot less work. Look, I’ve got to—”

“Okay.” Kiernan stood up. “You inherited some of the corporate groups. Who’re the contact people?”

He wasn’t prepared for that, she could tell. It was a moment before he said, “I can’t give out their names.”

“Ben, you said you’d help me however you could. You cared about Robin.”

He glanced toward the dock and back. “Okay, I’ll check. Call me tonight.”

“Come on. You can remember one or two.”

“I’d rather check and be accurate.”

“Ben. When someone dies suspiciously, the trail gets cold real fast. You can’t afford to have me sitting around doing nothing all day today while the trail freezes. Just do the best you can. Give me the names you remember.”

A woman in a beaked cap clambered aboard, pole in one hand, a red and white hamper weighing down the other.

“Hey, Teresa. Good to see you,” Pedersen said, suddenly more jovial-sounding than she could have imagined.

“Ben.” Eyeing Kiernan, she said, “This your new lady?”

“No, hon. She’s just leaving. And the only lady in my life is Nelda here.” He patted the boat.

Kiernan didn’t move. “Names?”

“Okay,” he muttered. “Dwyer Cummings.”

S
O
D
WYER
C
UMMINGS HAD
been a frequent passenger of Robin’s. And now of Ben Pedersen’s. Pedersen might be sorry Robin was gone, but it sure hadn’t inhibited his business sense. Pedersen, Kiernan thought, was a man she’d trust a lot more in the ocean steering a boat than here on shore.

Dwyer Cummings, spokesman for Energy Producers’ Group. From what she’d heard of Cummings in the radio debate with Jessica Leporek she could picture him, leaning back in one of those swivel chairs in the rear of a boat, pole in the holder, beer in hand, a grin on his sunburned face as he explained to the guy next to him that offshore drilling platforms made great habitats for fish. No wonder Ben Pedersen hadn’t had a sign supporting the initiative in his boat. If Pedersen was in financial trouble, he wouldn’t be about to offend a source of income like Cummings.

Kiernan walked back to the restaurant end of the dock and looked wistfully at the dark windows. Why couldn’t just one of those places be open? Eating eggs, ham, muffins, home fries, and keeping surveillance on the dock at the same time—that was the right way to investigate. Sighing, she pulled her jacket tighter and settled in to watch one of the still-unemployed deckhands as he made his rounds from boat to boat.

The crowd around Pedersen’s boat had moved on board. He had indeed benefited from Robin’s absence, Kiernan thought. But had it been enough to pull him out of his financial hole?

By six-fifteen, the sea lion had been joined by two others, and the barking sounded like a kennel at feeding time. The jobless deckhand—Zack, she’d heard him called—ambled toward the sidewalk, hands dug deep into the pockets of his too-large jeans. There was an uncertainty to his step, not quite a shuffle, which, if Kiernan hadn’t known better, she would have sworn came from a couple of days on a rolling boat.

“No luck, Zack?” she asked.

He shrugged. Like his jeans, his windbreaker was too large. A gust of wind caught the faded blue fabric and it flapped against his narrow ribs. For a moment it looked as if he’d be blown off the dock. “It’s a long haul back to my room,” was all he said.

Kiernan smiled. This was a man ready to deal. “Did you know Robin Matucci?”

“Early Bird?
The one who went under? Sure.”

“Tell me about her over breakfast.”

“And a ride back to my room?”

“Done. Come on.”

The fancy restaurants may have been still closed, but a tourist mecca was not without its advantages—plenty of motels with 24-hour restaurants or coffee shops. The nearest was two blocks away.

As Kiernan walked in, she noticed almost automatically that there were no closed phone booths. The blatantly fake “nautical” decor looked as out of place as the people in the room—mostly white-clad tourists who were used to humid mornings in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, or warm nights in Lakewood, New Jersey, folks from normal climates who hadn’t believed the warnings they’d got about the chill morning fog in San Francisco. Now they sat shivering in shorts and thin tennis sweaters. In contrast to their crisp, clean whiteness, Zack looked like a sack of garbage left behind by the last shift. His frayed wool cap and salt-stained windbreaker seemed ridiculously out of place behind the lime-green tablecloth and pink napkins.

“I’ve traveled enough to know the safest bet for breakfast in places like this,” Kiernan told him, glancing at the menu. “Eggs scrambled medium—it’s hard to screw that up, but get lots of ketchup in case they do; wheat toast and plenty of jelly. Lots of coffee, regardless of what it tastes like.”

“Bacon?”

“Right, bacon or ham.” She smiled. “Never order sausage if you haven’t counted the strays.”

“How about a beer?”

What he did to his liver wasn’t her business. Who was she to … But she knew no amount of arguing could erase the memory of all the cirrhotic livers she’d seen in bodies too young to be dead. “The offer was breakfast.”

“I have beer with breakfast.”

“Don’t wheedle. You want breakfast and the ride, or not?”

He scowled. His skin wasn’t puffy, but he had the look of old, weather-exposed wood—gray and sere, all resilience gone, held up by the support posts of familiarity.

When they’d ordered, she said, “So tell me about Robin Matucci. You ever work for her?”

“No.”

“Ever try?”

“Yeah,” he muttered, mostly to his napkin.

“Why?”

“Pay.”

“Why didn’t you get on?”

He shrugged. Clearly he was going to give as little as possible in return for his nonalcoholic meal. His face tightened in anger, but Kiernan couldn’t read him well enough to guess whether it was a reaction to her continued questions, or something else. Zack was one of those sources who needed to be coddled. But “bedside manner” had never been her strong point. She’d have to make some effort, though. “Robin had a reputation for hiring deckhands who weren’t too bright.”

Zack laughed. “Not too bright, that’s a good one.”

“But why, Zack?”

“She had to be the boss. She was real nice around the dock. But on
Early Bird
she couldn’t stand a guy who could bait a hook without her permission.”

The food arrived. Zack glared down at it. Ignoring him, Kiernan mixed the bacon in with the eggs, lathered the jelly on the toast and dug in. After Tchernak’s breakfasts all others huddled together in mediocrity, but that didn’t keep her from downing them. When she looked up, halfway through, Zack had finished the bacon and toast. His face looked less gray, and the fearful squint of his eyes had relaxed.

Kiernan put down her fork. “Tell me about Carlos Delaney. Was he as dumb as Robin liked?”

“No way. Delaney was a bright guy. I’ll tell you how bright he was.” Zack leaned forward conspiratorily. “He sized her up real quick. And she probably never caught on.”

“How’d you catch on?”

Zack grinned, exposing a space where a left lateral incisor had once been. “His questions. He may have got her number—he had to do that if he planned to keep his job—but he didn’t bother to get mine. He figured just what you did, that Zack’s an old alky with slosh for brains, right?” He stared at her until she nodded and smiled. “He used me like a textbook. Where was this on the boat, where’s the best place to keep that? Asked me how the loran worked, for Chrissakes. Didn’t even know about triangular navigation.” He laughed. “He even asked me what a harpoon was.”

Harpoon.
That was the second time that word had come up this morning.

“Do you use harpoons with party-boat fishing?”

Zack laughed louder, a surprisingly raw sound. At the table behind him a couple turned to stare, then eyed each other as if to say, “Only in San Francisco.” Oblivious, he said to Kiernan, “Jeez, you’re no Einstein either. If we gave harpoons to some of the geezers we take out, they’d be over the side with them.”

“So why did Carlos ask?”

Zack leaned across the table. “He didn’t say.”

“But you figured it out?” Kiernan prompted.

“Oh yeah. He asked me three times. Probably thought I wouldn’t remember. Robin made calls to ‘Harpoon’ on the ship-to-shore radio. Delaney thought it was a place, like a lighthouse or a cove, or maybe it had some kind of code meaning.”

“Why’d he think that?”

“I don’t know. Delaney wasn’t a big talker.”

Maybe he just hadn’t talked to Zack. “Where’d he live?”

“He spent a week at the Neptune. A lot of us stay there. But that was a month and a half ago. Then he moved. I don’t know where.”

“Why did he move, Zack?”

He shrugged. “Maybe he learned all he wanted to know about us by then.”

Kiernan signaled for the check, paid it, stopped in the bathroom—another rule of the investigator: never pass up an indoor privy—and met Zack at the Jeep. It was light now, the sun had risen high enough to expose the lid of gray over the city.

She started the Jeep and pulled into traffic. “Zack, what do you think of Ben Pedersen?”

“It’d take a lot more than a meal to make me rat on Ben. Ben’s father and grandfather fished from the wharf. Ben’s been on boats since he was a kid. He’s more ‘wharf’ than that bastardized bunch of boards they’ve got left there is. The wharf used to be a working dock; used to be home to the fishing fleet. No more. Only enough boats left to con the tourists into thinking it’s real. Don’t you go saying nothing against Ben. He’d give up his balls before he’d let anything happen to the
Dream.”