And the Sea Will Tell (18 page)

Bernard Leonard had stayed at the yacht club until late the previous evening after talking to the FBI agent, waiting for something to happen. Coast Guardsmen discreetly attempted to interview several people on boats adjacent to the
Sea Wind
. Leonard thought that was a mistake, because it might tip off Roy and Jennifer that they were being sought. When no one had boarded the
Sea Wind
by midnight, Leonard returned to his own boat. It had been a long, emotionally taxing day and night.

Promised that Coast Guard authorities would bring their cutter into the harbor the next morning in order to board the
Sea Wind
, Leonard was up at dawn and walked to Coast Guard headquarters at Pier 4 about a mile away. His self-appointed role was to help identify whoever was found aboard the boat.

A few minutes after he arrived at his office that morning at eight o’clock, the FBI’s Cal Shishido received a hurried call from the Coast Guard. The lookout posted near the yacht club had just reported seeing a man and woman getting ready to leave the
Sea Wind
in a dinghy. Since the lookout had obviously missed their return to the sailboat during the night, the cutter’s crew had been caught unprepared. It would take a few minutes to get ready, Shishido was told, and if he could get down to Pier 4 pronto, he could join in the pursuit.

Driven in a rush by another agent, Shishido arrived at the pier three minutes later. As usual, he wore a colorful aloha print shirt,
^*
which stood out on deck among all the blue dungarees of the Coast Guardsmen.

The Coast Guard cutter’s engine was already rumbling when Shishido stepped aboard. He nodded to Wallisch and Leonard.

The Coast Guard officer started to say something, but a crackling radio report from a lookout interrupted: “The woman dropped the guy off at one of the docks in the harbor and headed back to the sailboat.” Things were getting complicated. Now there were two separate quarries.

The deckhands cast off, and the forty-foot cutter was on its way, speeding toward the harbor entrance from its nearby base.

A second report from the lookout came in: the man on the dock, apparently trying to avoid Coast Guardsmen in the harbor, had shed his clothing and dived into the water.

It took only a few minutes for the swift cutter to arrive at the Ala Wai, where it immediately swung into the harbor. From its deck, Shishido and the others spotted the dinghy—with a woman aboard—now heading lickety-split for shore.

“That’s her!” Leonard cried out. “That’s Jennifer!”

When Jennifer spotted the cutter closing on her, she started rowing more rapidly. She had almost reached land already.

She made it to a pile of rocks, leaped from the dinghy, and scrambled over a low seawall like a spooked lizard. From the cutter, Leonard and Shishido saw her pause momentarily to allow a small dog to catch up. She scooped it up maternally in her arms and ran toward the nearby Ilikai Marina Hotel.

A
FTER DIVING
into the water, Buck Walker took several powerful strokes underwater, clearing the keel of a boat, then surfaced, gulped a deep breath, and began swimming under boats and docks alike, heading in the general direction of shore.

Lungs bursting, he finally surfaced between two boats. He heard some frantic yelling. “I lost him. Anybody see him?” Buck took another deep breath and went under again. When he came up next, he was in a narrow space under a dock. He heard footsteps pounding overhead and excited voices shouting.

He cursed to himself.
Goddamn dogs! She should have left them alone
. Not more than twenty minutes before, a man on a neighboring boat had yelled to Jennifer, on her way in the dinghy to the public rest room ashore, that the Coast Guard had been around the night before asking questions about them. She returned to the boat immediately, and told Buck. He had known then it was time to abandon the
Sea Wind
, and they had done so with dispatch. As they grimly rowed to shore, Buck’s two dogs—left behind on deck—began barking loudly. Jennifer, apparently afraid they would disturb the neighbors, wanted to return and put them below deck. Buck had argued that the idea was crazy. When she insisted, he demanded she drop him off first at the nearest dock. They had intended to meet at the bathhouse on the beach. But as he was walking up the dock toward shore, he had spotted an armed Coast Guardsman off in the distance coming his way. Buck turned down a narrow offshoot of one dock, slowing his pace so as not to look suspicious. Pretending to be interested in the boats tied up on either side of him, he watched the serviceman out of the corner of his eye. While the detour had prevented a face-to-face encounter for the moment, it had also cut off Buck’s access to shore. He was trapped. When, a minute or so later, the serviceman started getting closer, Buck didn’t hesitate. He quickly stripped down to a bathing suit he had on and dove in.

Now, under a dock, Buck didn’t move a muscle. He stayed where he was long after his teeth began chattering from the cold water.

I
N HOT
pursuit of Jennifer, Bernard Leonard and Lieutenant Wallisch had immediately gone ashore in a launch.

Shishido, still no more than an observer of a Coast Guard inquiry, elected to stay aboard the cutter.

Pulling up where Jennifer had abandoned the
Sea Wind
’s dinghy, Leonard and the officer ran toward the hotel. In the lobby, they rounded a pillar and spotted a woman crouching ludicrously behind a potted plant near the elevators. She was cradling a small dog.

Leonard, his heart pounding, nodded at the officer.

“Miss,” the Coast Guardsman said, “you’ll have to come with us.”

Jennifer stood up, keeping a hold on Puffer. “Hi, Bernie,” she said with a sheepish grin.

“Hello, Jennifer,” he responded sternly.

“I want to tell you what happened. I really do. But can I go to the bathroom first?”

The officer replied that they had to return to the ship immediately. He put his hand under her elbow and led the way out of the hotel lobby.

Outside, he decided to tow the
Sea Wind
’s dinghy with the cutter’s launch. He asked Leonard to stay with Jennifer in the dinghy for the short ride.

Once they pushed off from shore, Leonard looked solemnly at Jennifer and asked: “Are Mac and Muff alive?”

“You’ll never believe what happened. They invited us over for dinner. They were going fishing and they knew they were going to be late. They told us to make ourselves at home. After dark, we turned on the masthead light and waited all night for them. They never showed up. The next morning, we went looking for them and found the Zodiac capsized. We searched for days and didn’t find any sign of them. We left a few days later on the
Iola
, but she got hung up on the reef, and when we couldn’t get her off, we went back and got the
Sea Wind
.”

“You wouldn’t have left on the
Iola
,” Leonard said in a tone that suggested he wasn’t buying one syllable of her story. “Not with the
Sea Wind
sitting there.”

She looked at him, but didn’t say anything.

They pulled alongside the cutter, which had come down the channel toward the hotel. They boarded and then climbed down a ladder to a compartment below deck. Cal Shishido was waiting with several Coast Guard investigators.

“Are you Jennifer Allen?” asked Wallisch.

“Yes—er, well, Jenkins,” she stammered, sounding nervous. “Jennifer Jenkins is my name.”

“What is the name of the boat you came here on?”

“The
Sea Wind
.”

“Whose boat is it?”

“Mac and Muff Graham’s.”

“What happened to them?” the officer asked.

“They drowned on a fishing trip,” Jennifer replied without hesitation. “It was an accident.”

Shishido stepped in to advise Jennifer of her constitutional rights. The boat’s owners were missing under suspicious circumstances, and this woman had ended up on their boat, which had been sailed to Hawaii. At the very least, he had reason to believe that the federal crime of interstate transportation of stolen property had been committed.
^*
Of course, the agent was now far more concerned about the fate of the Grahams. If their deaths had truly been accidental, why hadn’t Jenkins and Allen reported the incident to authorities immediately upon their return to Hawaii?

For the next hour, Jennifer recounted how she and her boyfriend had ended up on Palmyra, become friends with the Grahams, and been upset by their puzzling disappearance. This discourse was interrupted only twice—once when she finally was allowed to use the bathroom, and again when she was taken back to the
Sea Wind
to restrain Buck’s dogs so that authorities could search the vessel. On the return trip to the cutter, Jennifer dropped off Puffer at a nearby boat whose owner agreed to look after the pet.

Developments in the search for Roy Allen were relayed to Shishido throughout the morning. Jennifer’s boyfriend had not been seen since diving into the water. The pants and shirt he’d shucked at the end of the dock were brought to the cutter, and Shishido went through them.

Inside a wallet, he found a Hawaii driver’s license and ID picture in the name of Roy Allen. There was also a separate small photo of the same man wearing a clerical collar.

Shishido held up the driver’s license and asked Jennifer if this was her companion, whom she had previously identified by the name of Roy Allen.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is he a minister?” the agent asked.

Jennifer smiled. “Universal Life Church. You know, that place in California that will ordain you through the mail for ten dollars.”

“I see.” He put the wallet down. “Tell me, if the Grahams were killed in an accident and you did nothing wrong, why were you attempting to flee?”

“We came here on a boat that doesn’t belong to us.” She looked as if she wanted to say something more.

“Is that all?”

She simply nodded.

Shishido later wrote up a summary of what Jennifer told him: His report read in part: