The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer (21 page)

Means: Lionel Hartzell was himself taking Lasix, one
of the medications used to kill Andy. This was not surprising, as a
large percentage of older men are on this or similar medications. In
addition, a quick survey by Keegan revealed that no fewer than eight
of Hartzell's contemporaries in Woods Hole were on digoxin, the other
component of the fatal medication that stopped Andy Cunningham's
heart. Therefore, the proximity and availability of these drugs to
Hartzell, and his background in physiology and chemistry, provided
him with the means for the murder, the means nobody else had.

"You gotta admit, Doc, Keegan did a helluva job.
Comes down here, solo, and in less than a week's time has collared a
suspect that looks very, very good for it."

Joe and I were sitting on the concrete quay adjoining
the Coast Guard station, watching jellyfish pulsating through the
water below. They looked like clear plastic Baggies sprung to life,
rhythmically contracting and dilating their parachute-shaped bells,
squeezing their way through the brine. Inside the bells lurked some
dense material that resembled cloudy cauliflower. Disgusting. I
prayed Moe wouldn't see these. No doubt he'd want one—or maybe
eight—for his aquarium.

"Well?"

"Well what?" I answered. "What can I
say? I think Hartzell looks like a good bet on this thing, the old
fart. I always thought so. Question is, can Keegan make anything
stick?"

"That's the hard part," he sighed. "In
fact, the only thing Keegan's got sticking, at this point, is his
neck out. If he can't get an indictment, his case falls apart real
fast, and he's got his ass in a sling. I'm sure he's taking this
chance for Jackie, Doc; he's convinced Jack's innocent. But for what
it's worth, I like Hartzell a lot for it. Every piece fits. And know
what? Basically, it's a psycho killing, which fits best of all. Here
we were, lacking a motive and trying to figure out if the mob
enforcers could have done it. Well, we all suspected the mob would
never kill a kid for gambling debts. And we knew they'd never do it
in such a sneaky way."

"I was the one who first said that, remember?"

"Uh-huh. And it's true. If the mob had done it,
it'd be a straight hit, clean and fast. Something like this: a knock
on Andy's door, the fake delivery man holding a bulky package, and
when Andy turns around to set the bogus package on the table, out
comes the twenty-two auto pistol—"

"Right. That's more their style. Our late friend
Carmen DeLucca would have loved it."

"So with the kid's back turned, the button man
leans over close, holding the piece, say, half a foot from the head.
The pistol, of course, is hot from across the country, with serial
numbers filed off, disposable silencer in place, bore of the barrel
mutilated with a jeweler's rat-tail file to nullify the ballistics
tests, and no prints."

"Yeah, right—"
 
"Then
thuff thuff
two quick
pops in the back of the head. Before the kid even hits the floor, the
delivery man's dropped the piece in the wastebasket and is out and
gone, hoofing it back to the car before the kid's even stopped
twitching. Now that's a mob hit. Hey, what's wrong?"

"What's wrong?" I answered, almost falling
off the quay in a fit of dizziness, "what the hell do you mean,
what's wrong? You've just described the cold-blooded murder of a kid
and you ask me what's wrong? Sweet Jesus, Joe. And what if the mob
did set out to kill Andy, and just by accident got his roommate,
Jack, instead?"

"Oh yeah. See what you mean, Doc."

"But finish what you were saying. Why does a
psycho killing fit so well?"

"Because nobody could figure out a motive that
was strong enough. Who would want the kid dead? We couldn't find
anybody who hated him, and he wasn't rich, so that eliminated the
personal gain motive. So we were stuck. Until Keegan put the pieces
together. Now it all fits."

"So this nutty professor, who's convinced the
effort of a lifetime is being taken from him, thinks up a way to kill
Andy while he's away from Woods Hole. He knows he won't get caught
because one, he was nowhere near the scene of death and two, everyone
will assume the boy died of his epilepsy." `

"Uh-huh. It was almost perfect, and it shows
that a crazed mind is still capable of rational thought and
painstaking planning."

I sat and thought a minute.

"And so it was Hartzell who tossed the kids'
house and ransacked the Breakers?"

"Yep. Look: Hartzell's convinced the kids are
stealing his stuff. He confronts them, accuses them. Of course they
deny it and tell him to kiss off. So he sits and steams over it. And
from what you've said about Andy—the way you and Jack and Mary have
described him to me—I'd bet that he was very direct with old man
Hartzell. I bet he told him exactly what he thought of him."

"That part's true for sure; Jack told me as
much."

"
So Andy was the first victim. And I'd say we're
lucky Keegan nabbed Hartzell when he did. Because, you ask me, Jack
was next."

I gave an involuntary shudder.

"We1l, I hope they commit him for life. But
still, I have doubts about the burglary thing. Why would he break
into Andy's house, then go up alone to Eastham and do the Breakers?"

"He was searching for the data he was convinced
Andy took."

"Listen Joe: Jack's told me more than once that
Andy didn't take Hartzell's notes; Andy thought the old guy was wacko
and that the project was, too."

"
So what? We're talking from Hartzell's point of
view: Andy stole the data. So, one, Andy had to die for it. Two: the
place to look for it was Andy's house."

"And when he didn't find it down here, he
assumed Andy had taken it with him up to our cottage."

"Right. And when he had a chance, he went up
there and tossed the Breakers, trying to recover it."

"That's interesting, Joe. Because just yesterday
Jack hefted Andy's duffel bag and said that it was a lot heavier on
the way up to Eastham. So maybe Andy did rip off old man Hartzell.
And maybe he did hide the stuff in the cottage."

"And maybe Hartzell recovered it. Lot of good
it'll do him in the slammer."

"Even though Jack's convinced Andy didn't take
anything of Hartzell's."

"Well, considering the circumstances, Doc, maybe
Jack should keep his mouth shut about that. Savvy?"

"Gotcha. Hey, here they come now. This is what
I've been waiting for."

We watched the thirty-foot sea skiff round the point
and head toward us. Built for offshore expeditions, the
Mala
Mala
was powered by twin stern-drive Volvo
engines, each over a hundred horsepower. It resembled a cross between
an open, deep-water lobster boat and a big Boston Whaler. As an open
boat, it had no cabin, instead relying for shelter on its high, wide
bow with lots of flair. The bow was kicking up a nice wave with two
pretty fans of spray. Jack was at the wheel, with Tony and Tom
McDonnough on either side of him, sitting at the big center control
console. On the boat's side was the Department of Commerce logo and
the words NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES.

"You sure you don't wanna come along?" I
asked Joe.

"I'm sure. You ask me, you guys are nitwits,
going out to look at whales in that thing. Hell, they're twice as
long and thirty times heavier than that little boat. They get the
slightest little bit pissed off, it's all she wrote."

"Yeah, but they won't get pissed off. They're
nice. They love people."

"That's what jonah thought," he said,
getting up and brushing off the seat of his pants. "And poor old
Ahab, too. When you get back, let me know if you'll be needing a
wooden leg."

"It was an ivory leg, not a wooden one. And
besides, Moby Dick was a sperm whale, a toothed whale. These are
humpback whales, baleen whales that aren't aggressive . . . I think."

"You hope.
Arrivederla.

And so he sauntered off
toward the docks with that rolling, elephantine shuffle of his.

* * *

We were out there. Way, way out there, riding the
soft, slow swells of the big water. We'd raced over the waves for an
hour, and were almost thirty miles offshore, in the neighborhood of
the treacherous Nantucket Shoals. Tom worked the helm, keeping his
eyes on the horizon and on the console compass, while I watched the
chart that was stretched over my knees, the corners of the paper
rattling in the wind. Together we would keep a rough estimate of our
position. No land was visible; we could have been in the
mid-Atlantic. This is an unsettling feeling, especially in a
thirty-foot open boat with nothing over your head, not even a mast
and sails. Jack and Tony glassed the ocean with marine binoculars,
searching for that telltale puff of breath vapor, the spout that
signaled a surfacing whale. So far, we'd had no luck.

A tuna boat came chugging into view. Jack told me it
was what's called a "stick boat," meaning a harpoon boat.
It had a long bowsprit and high spotting tower that gave it a
rickety, insectlike appearance. Its diesel engine gave off a faint
rhum-rhum-rhum
that
came to us over the slick, oily-smooth water. The tuna boat rolled in
the big swells, the high tower swaying in a ten-foot arc, the spotter
sitting Indian fashion on the tiny plywood platform eighteen feet
above the deck, gripping the stays with his crossed legs. He wore
big, wrap-around dark glasses, and his nose and cheekbones were
painted mime white with zinc oxide ointment. He held a huge pair of
naval binoculars. When he spotted the Marine Fisheries logo on the
side of the
Mala Mala
,
he pointed northeast, making a dipping, diving motion with his
flattened palm.

"He's telling us there are whales further out,"
said Tom as he spun the wheel, heading us over to the fishing boat.
The tuna boat was old, its planked sides flaking paint chips and
stained with rust streaks. Two of the cabin windows were cracked and
the smokestack was solid rust. Guy wires ran from the long bowsprit
pole back to the bow, and also up to the tower from the deck and
topsides, and then down to the bowsprit tip from above, much like the
standing rigging of a Grand Banks schooner. But the wire was old,
tightened and repaired with turnbuckles, bolt clamps, and wound
coils. The entire vessel had a frail, rickety appearance, resembling
a giant, splayed cricket, or perhaps a water strider that ticked and
groaned its way through the sea. It looked as if it would come apart
any second.

There were three men aboard: the skipper, the
lookout, and the harpooner, who was busy coiling lines into plastic
tubs on the foredeck. Two harpoon shafts were braced against the
cabin sides, and three old beer kegs, spray-painted Day-glo orange
for visibility, stood in a crude rack. Reminded me of the movie jaws.

"You see whales?" shouted Jack to the
lookout.

"Yeah!" shouted the man with the
binoculars. "Fins and humpbacks, about four miles up the line.
Maybe six miles by now." We thanked the men and headed on,
looking back to see the vessel's name on her wide, low transom: the
Auk
.

We saw the tuna boat grow small in the distance, then
disappear over the southern horizon. I thought of that frail machine
crawling over the wide ocean and shuddered. How presumptuous of man
to head out over the deep in crafts like that. Down below us, in the
several hundred feet of cold darkness, giant forms pushed through the
water, six or seven times the mass of the biggest African bull
elephants, moving soundlessly, gliding through the black,
steep-walled undersea canyons. Huge slimy things lurked on or near
the bottom, with gnashing beaks, poison spines, sucking mouths.
Razor-toothed Sea-raptors prowled the blackness, too, waiting for a
chance to attack animals of all sizes and engage in silent combat,
with billowing, red-brown clouds of blood and shivering, trembling
masses of injured muscle and severed nerves . . .

There was a whole lot of bad jazz down there. Oodles
of it, including a spiny fish the size of a toad that can kill a
horse with its venom, and a stomatopod as long as a cigar, called a
mantis shrimp, that can crack your skull with a flip of its forelegs.
And here we were in our little skiff, crawling our feeble way over
the top of it all.

It was almost two o'clock when we saw the first pod
of humpbacks. Following my sons' pointing fingers, I saw the
occasional cloud of vapor coming up from the surface of the ocean,
but no whales were visible. Accustomed to old whaling prints showing
breaching whales leaping over whaleboats, with the terrified
occupants scrambling for their lives, I expected at least to see a
lot of animal. Instead, when we drew near, I saw a dark, slick mass
rolling gently over on the water, perhaps two feet high at its
tallest point. A section of blacktop highway, sliding over. Big deal.
But then the surprise: after twenty feet or so of this slick macadam
came the tail. The tail was horizontal, with flukes set wide like the
wings of a jet, each the size and shape of a small dingy, measuring
nine feet from tip to tip. It was jet black and shiny, gently
serrated along its rear edge, maybe two feet thick in the center,
tapering to mere inches at the tips. It moved with absolute grace,
lifting a few feet, standing clear of the water, dripping at its
drooped edges like a fresh-plucked lily pad, and then sliding under,
without a sound and with scarcely a ripple.