Wolf in the Shadows (24 page)

“What?”

“That goddamn Pete!”

“Pete who works for my brother?”

“Yeah.” Vic’s expression soured. “Pete’s my cousin’s kid, and he’s okay, but he’s one of these guys who, you know, plays the
angles. He does things for Salazar—I don’t even wanna know what. I bet he’s the one put him onto you.”

“You mean after John asked him to find out what you knew about the Anglo who came in here?”

“Uh-huh. Pete came around with his picture—same picture you showed me—and I told him what’d gone down. Then I gave Ana Orozco
a call, and Pete took down her address to pass on to you. He probably peddled the info to Salazar.”

“But why would he think Salazar’d be interested in me—or in what I was investigating?”

Vic shrugged. “Salazar’s interested in everything that goes on in the South Bay. And he pays good.”

So it probably had been one of Salazar’s people watching me later that afternoon as I sat in the Scout outside Luis Abrego’s
building. Which meant Salazar had been more or less prepared for the questions I’d asked him that night. Those were Salazar’s
people outside my father’s house, too. The man in the Padres cap whom I’d lost in the maze of Huston’s department store? And
what about right now?

I frowned and glanced through the barred window at the parking lot. Vic noticed my discomfort and muttered, “I’d like to bust
Pete’s face!”

“We’ll let my brother take care of him,” I said. “In the meantime, can I ask a favor of you?”

“I figure I owe you one. What d’you need?”

“A ride to the Avis rental car office downtown.”

“
No problema
. And I know how to do it so if anybody’s watching, they’ll never suspect a thing. I’ll just have my stock boy take you out
of here like a sack of potatoes in my delivery van.”

I wasn’t sure I cared for the comparison, but I went along without complaint.

*    *    *

While I was waiting for my latest rental car to be brought around, I called Ron Chan’s number from a pay phone in the office.
No answer. Next I dropped more coins in the slot and punched out the number I’d found earlier in the directory. Professor
Emeritus Harold Haslett of U.C. San Diego wasn’t at his Point Loma residence, but a pleasant-voiced woman who said she was
his housekeeper told me I could find him down at the harbor. When I asked where, she replied vaguely, “Oh, anywhere near the
G Street Mole.” G Street Mole is what old-timers call the area that’s been renamed Tuna Harbor, and as I hung up I wondered
why Professor Haslett—a friend of Melvin Hunt, whom I’d met at the buffet supper he and my mother had given on Christmas
Eve—was spending his Saturday in what was basically a tourist trap.

My transportation, a perky white Toyota Tercel that I rented with a cash deposit, arrived just then. After I got in and familiarized
myself with it, I set off to follow the lead that had seemed so promising the night before.

San Diego Bay once harbored the nation’s largest tuna fleet, as well as many other types of commercial fishing vessels. I
can remember going to the piers as a child to see my uncle Ed, whose frequent gifts of the daily catch helped to make the
McCone food budget more manageable. Back then the waterfront was a bustling, exciting place lined with seamen’s cafÉs and
taverns, surplus stores, tattoo parlors, marine outfitters, rescue missions, cheap hotels and rooming houses, and the inevitable
pawnshops. Packs of sailors roamed the area at all hours, congregating in front of poolrooms and hiring halls, drinking beer
or fresh-roasted coffee, checking out the pretty girls. Vessels of all types and sizes surged gently beside the docks. I was
particularly fascinated by the purse seiners, their nets piled on the pier alongside the boats while crewmen, who by and large
still spoke the Portuguese and Italian of their forebears, mended them.

Today the waterfront has lost most of its flavor. The tuna trade is all but extinct, due to the closing of the city’s two
remaining canneries in the early eighties. Although some fish are still trucked up the coast to a cannery near L.A., very
few seiners put into port at San Diego, and most commercial fishing is done by pole from smaller bait boats. The old tuna
piers sit blocked off and decaying. The tattoo parlors and taverns have been razed to make way for steel-and-glass high-rises
that dwarf the older structures. Ships containing museums—the
Star of India
and the steamer
Berkeley
—draw tourists; restaurants have proliferated. Farther south, Seaport Village offers theme-park dining and shopping.

Still, it’s a pretty harbor, one of the prettiest in the world, and after I parked and began strolling along the Embarcadero,
I felt a pang of regret for having left my native city. I found that if I looked toward the bay, I could call up some of the
feel of childhood. The smells were right—fish and creosote and brine—and so was the warmth of the sun and brush of sea air
against my skin. I ignored the throng of other strollers, tuned out their voices, and for a moment pretended I could hear
the lilting Portuguese and Italian of the fishermen as they bent over their nets. But then a kid with an ice-cream cone slammed
into me, nearly leaving a slick of chocolate on my jeans, and I was right back in the present.

By then I’d reached the area known as Tuna Harbor. A huge restaurant complex and parking lot sat at the edge of the water,
and then the land curved inward, sheltering what was left of the fleet—bait boats berthed in their slips. There were benches
along the sidewalk, many of them occupied by derelicts. I slowed, looking around for Professor Haslett. When I spotted him
on the southernmost bench, I felt something of a shock; he barely resembled the distinguished, impeccably attired gentleman
I’d conversed with at the Christmas Eve gathering.

Today the professor looked like one of those eccentric characters you often see along waterfronts: white-bearded, his thick
mane protected by a shabby seaman’s cap, wearing old khaki pants and a threadbare blue-and-white striped shirt. An old-fashioned
black lunch box, like the one I remembered my uncle Ed carrying, sat open beside him, and he’d set out a little picnic: sandwich,
chips, bottle of Guinness stout. His keen blue eyes surveyed the boats with a touch of bewilderment, as if he wondered how
our tuna fleet had come to this.

I went up to him and said, “Professor Haslett, do you remember me? Sharon McCone. We met last Christmas Eve.”

He looked up, squinting into the sun. “Of course, you’re Kay McCone’s girl.”

“Yes.” It still sounded strange to hear my mother called Kay. When she met Melvin—while doing her wash in one of the self-service
laundries he owned, of all things—she’d introduced herself by the diminutive of Kathryn that she favored, rather than as
Katie, which was what my father had always called her. Most of the people in her new life knew her only as Kay, and sometimes
hearing the new name made me feel—quite irrationally—that in choosing it she’d rejected everything that had gone before,
including me and my siblings. Hearing the professor speak it now brought to my mind a fragment of an old song—something about
being out of step, out of time—and in keeping with my resolve to let go of things past, I shook off the last of my resentment.
If my mother wanted to be called Kay, that was her business; it had nothing at all to do with me.

Professor Haslett was studying me. “You look different. Is it that you’ve cut your hair?”

“Yes.”

“Very becoming.” He motioned for me to share his bench, offered half of the sandwich. I accepted the former, declined the
latter. “Strange,” he added. “I spoke with Melvin last night and he didn’t mention you were visiting.”

“I’m not. This is a business trip, and I haven’t called them because time is short and my mother would be disappointed that
we can’t have a real visit.”

“And of course she would worry. Kay frets because your work is so dangerous.”

“Normally it isn’t; she magnifies the danger. Actually, Professor Haslett, I was hoping you could give me some information.
I called your home, and your housekeeper told me I could find you here.”

His smile became edged with melancholy. “I suppose you find my behavior strange, perhaps even pathetic. An old man who should
possess more dignity, aping the attire of his boyhood heroes, sitting on a bench beside his beloved harbor and mourning the
past.”

Haslett was a historian who had written a definitive history of San Diego Bay; if he mourned the past, he had more right than
most of us because he knew it so intimately. I said, “I see a man who’s wearing the clothes he’s comfortable in and enjoying
a place that’s still lovely. I wish I could spend my Saturday that way.”

“If you can enjoy merely sitting quietly and looking at the harbor, you’re as unusual a young woman as your mother claims,”
he told me. “People today don’t possess the capacity for contemplation; they want to be entertained. And they don’t honor
the past, quite frankly don’t have any interest in it. My former students are good examples: most of them elected to take
history merely to satisfy a requirement; they wanted to be fed the facts and have them interpreted for them, so they could
spit them back during their exams and scratch off yet another item on their educational shopping list. I was quite happy to
retire from active scholarship.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Five years now. Not that I’ve retired mentally, mind you. I may appear to be merely another eccentric old man taking the
sun, but actually I am conducting research for what will be my final long work—an analysis of the reasons for our port’s
decline.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“Not with bated breath, I hope.” He winked. “I am approaching seventy-eight and find myself enjoying the research far more
than the writing.”

I smiled and for a moment we watched a fisherman struggling along the dock with a heavy bucket. Then I said, “It’s your expertise
on maritime matters that I hope to tap into. What can you tell me about a Mexican tuna fishing fleet owner named Gilbert Fontes?”

Haslett pursed his lips—more belligerently than thoughtfully. “Fontes is a good example of the forces that have destroyed
our port. The Corona Fleet was once the largest in our harbor. Fontes bought it in ’seventy-two. His first act was to reregister
the vessels in Mexico—his method of evading the U.S. inspections mandated by the new Marine Mammal Protection Act. When they
found out, local environmentalists … I believe you’re an environmentalist? Didn’t we talk at Christmas of that dreadful business
you were involved in up at Tufa Lake?”

I nodded. “I don’t belong to any of the organizations, although I contribute money when I can. Organizations and I don’t get
on too well.”

“I’m not a fan of them myself. To get back to Fontes, in the mid-seventies local environmentalists staged protests at his
home on Point Loma. The situation got out of hand. Fontes had … what shall I call them? Bodyguards?”

“I know a man who calls them his ‘people.’ The right word is ‘thugs.’ ”

“Yes. Fontes had thugs, and they beat some of the protesters quite badly. The violence escalated. A neighborhood group got
up in arms—not against the protesters, but against Fontes. Do you know what his response was?”

I shook my head.

“He moved the fleet to Ensenada, nearly bankrupting one of our canneries. And he closed up the house on Point Loma and moved
his household to Baja. He still owns the place, but never uses it himself; strange people come and go there, however, making
the neighbors—myself included—extremely nervous. A few years ago a number of us got together and made an offer on it, but
Fontes turned it down. It’s his way of striking back.”

“Where does Fontes live now, Ensenada?”

“No, in a village on the coast, where the local authorities will protect him from protests. The Mexican environmentalists
are thoroughly sick of his business practices, too. As you probably know, Mexico was signatory to last year’s international
accord to reduce the dolphin kill by eighty percent, but that hasn’t stopped Fontes.”

“Fontes has a brother who’s an environmentalist, right?”

“Yes. The two don’t speak, and the brother, Emanuel, bought out Gilbert’s share of the family business—some sort of manufacturing
concern—many years ago. Still, Emanuel has never dared use his connections to mount a protest against Gilbert.” The professor’s
smile was pained. “Freedom of speech and assembly are not held in high regard by the Mexican Federal Police.”

“Where in Baja is this village?”

“South of Ensenada. It’s called El Sueño—‘the dream,’ it translates. Many wealthy people, both Mexican and American, have
homes there.”

“And the house on Point Loma?”

“On Sunset Cliffs Boulevard.” Professor Haslett glanced curiously at me. “You seem very much interested in Gilbert Fontes.
Is he part of the business that brings you here?”

“He may be. Since you’re knowledgeable about environmental organizations, what do you know of a group called Terramarine?”

He made a disgusted sound with his lips. “They’re extremists and fools who put the movement to shame. They remind me of small
children huddling in a cardboard-box clubhouse in a vacant lot, making their war plans. They light matches and talk of how
they’ll set the world on fire, but in the end all that gets burned is the box, with them inside. Unfortunately, innocent bystanders
often get hurt as well.”

“Let me ask you this: Can you imagine them pulling off a successful act of terrorism? Say, a kidnapping where they collected
a large ransom?”

He considered. “They would bungle it—deplorably. And I would pity their victim, because he or she would not survive.”

Now his gaze became assessing, concerned. I avoided his eyes by looking at the harbor. The air had grown hot and turgid; my
forehead and scalp were damp.

“Sharon,” the professor said after a moment, “I feel I should stress that even though the Terramarine people are fools, their
very foolishness makes them dangerous.”

I nodded.