Man on a Leash (5 page)

“Why?” Romstead asked. He had brought Paulette home, and they sat in the air-conditioned living room of her house with the bloody Marys she had promised. It was too hot now to sit out by the pool, and neither was interested in lunch with the death of Jeri Bonner weighing on their spirits. The Romstead house was locked up again, and Brubaker had said he would notify Sam Bolling so the broken window could be replaced. Romstead had given him the key to return. “I don’t think he knew the stuff was there either,” he went on, “but what makes you so sure of it?”

“Because I knew him. Better than anybody here.” She set her drink on the coffee table between them and lit a cigarette. “I’ve heard his views on the subject, and like all the rest of his views, they were pretty strong. He had nothing but contempt for people who used drugs of any kind—except, of course, for his drugs: Havana cigars, brandy, and vintage champagne—and an even worse loathing for pushers and smugglers who dealt in any of it, even marijuana. On the
Fairisle,
his last command, he arrested one of his own crew for trying to smuggle some heroin in on it. I mean, right out of the eighteenth century, locked him up like Bligh throwing somebody in the brig, and turned him over to the federal agents when they docked. High-handed, oh, brother—he could have been fired for it or picketed by every maritime union in the country, except that the man was guilty, he had the heroin to prove it, and the guy was convicted and sent to prison. That’s no wild sea yarn, either; I knew the nut myself. He was out in orbit, a dingaling with a hundred and sixty IQ. But I was going to tell you how we met, almost five years ago.”

She hesitated a moment, rattling the ice in her drink; then she looked up with bubbling amusement. “This is a kooky experience—I mean, telling a son about your affair with his father. I feel like a dirty old woman or as if I were contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“It’s all right,” Romstead said. “I’m precocious for thirty-six.”

“Good. I felt fairly certain you might be ... Anyway, this happened in 1967. Steve—my husband —was a businessman, mostly real estate and land development, here in Nevada and in Southern California; but his health was beginning to give him trouble, and he was semi-retired. We lived about half the time at our place in La Jolla and did quite a bit of sailing. Steve had been an ocean-racing nut since he was a young man, but he’d given that up when his health began to fail. He sold the Ericson thirty-nine and bought a thirty-six-foot cruising sloop a couple could handle, and we planned to sail it to Honolulu, just the two of us.

“Then Lew Bonner asked us if we’d take Jeri, Lew was working for Steve then, running a lumberyard and building supply here in Coleville, and we both knew Jeri, of course, and liked her. She was a real sweet kid, but becoming something of a hippie, and it bothered Lew a little. Most jocks are as square as Smokey the Bear, anyway—oops. The good old Carmody tact, but then I don’t think of you as a jock, somehow.”

Romstead shrugged. “Neither did the National League.”

“Their parents were dead, and Lew had looked after her since she was sixteen. She’d been going to school at San Diego State but dropped out and was hanging out with a bunch of kids in Del Mar. She liked sailing and thought the trip would be groovy, or whatever the word was in 1967, so she came along.

“Everything went along fine until about a thousand miles out of Honolulu when we ran into a real bitch of a dustup. I don’t think it ever reached gale force, actually, but it kept freshening while we were running before it, and before we knew it, we were carrying too much sail and had already carried it too damned long. We broached to, got knocked down, lost the mast and sails overboard, and shipped enough water to soak everything below. But the worst of it was Steve. He was badly hurt. He’d got thrown across the deck and landed on something that caught him just below the rib cage. He was in awful pain and could hardly move. The radio was drowned, so we couldn’t call for help, and Jeri and I alone couldn’t cope with that mess over the side. We made Steve as comfortable as we could with the pain-killers from the medicine chest, but we were absolutely helpless.

“We were near the Los Angeles-Honolulu steamer lane, and late that afternoon we sighted a ship on the horizon and fired off some distress flares, but either it didn’t see us or didn’t give a damn, because it went on. And just about sunset, Steve died. I still wake up with a cold sweat, dreaming about that night. Jeri and I didn’t think we’d ever see dawn again, and before the night was over, we were so beaten we didn’t really care a great deal whether we did or not. But when daylight did come there was another ship in sight, way off on the horizon. All we could do was fire off the last of our flares and pray. Then we saw it had changed course and was coming. It was the
Fairisle.

“Your father sent over a boat and took us off. An autopsy was performed on Steve when we reached Honolulu, and the doctors said he’d died of internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. I’d had it with oceans for all time, or thought I had. After I got back home and began to recover a little, I wrote the usual letters thanking him and the boat crew and also to the line praising him for his seamanship and for the royal way we’d been treated after we were picked up.

“That would have been the end of it, normally, except that about a year later I was in San Francisco on a shopping jag and walked out of the City of Paris one afternoon and bumped right into him. He invited me to have a drink. I don’t know what he did three days later, when the tugs pulled the
Fairisle
away from the pier and she started down the bay, but I went back to the Mark and collapsed; I think I slept the clock around twice. Your father was one hell of a charming and fascinating man, and he had a way with women, as perhaps you’ve heard.

“When he came back from that trip, I was waiting for him in San Francisco, flew to Los Angeles to see him there, and then flew to Honolulu. The following trip I sailed with him, to Hong Kong, Kobe, and Manila—the
Fairisle
has accommodations for twelve passengers, you know. In the next three years I made three more trips to the Orient with him, and when he retired, I was partly responsible for his settling here. He wouldn’t even consider La Jolla.

“There was never any question of marriage. I was in no hurry to be married again, and certainly not to him, and he said from the start he’d never try it again, that he wasn’t cut out for domesticity—which I could see even then was probably the understatement of the century.

“I have no doubt he had another girl, or perhaps several of them at different times, in San Francisco, but whether she or one of them was Jeri Bonner, I don’t think so. She was only twenty-four, for one thing, and surprisingly, he didn’t go for very young women. I know this is contrary to the classic pattern of the aging stud, needing younger and younger girls to get it off the runway, but maybe he was saving that phase for his eighties and nineties; his theory was that no woman under thirty even knew what it was all about. And there was the drugs; if she was using heroin, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with her at all.”

And still the stuff had been in the house, and she’d known it was and just where to find it, Romstead thought. You never came up with any answers, only more questions. And though he liked her, the sexy Mrs. Carmody’s hymn to his father’s virtuosity as a lover was beginning to bug him; he’d been twenty days at sea. He thanked her for the drink, went back to the motel, and called Mayo.

“What did you find out?” she asked.

“Nothing you’d believe,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get there. Around eleven P.M.”

“I’ll wait for you at your place.”

“Good thinking.”

“Sure. I thought it would be convenient. So if you’re going to whizz through town in five minutes again, you can tell me about it while you’re taking a cold shower.”

“Let’s make that ten instead of eleven.”

He went out to the office, paid the toll charges, and left a call for five P.M. It was still a few minutes to ten that night when he emerged from the elevator in the high-rise complex overlooking the Embarcadero and the bay and padded quietly along the carpeted hallway to his apartment.

The lights were dim in the living room. Mayo Foley, clad in a housecoat with apparently nothing under it, was listening to Ravel with her feet and long bare legs up on the coffee table beside a champagne bucket. She smiled, with that smoky look in the deep blue eyes he’d come to know so well, and said, “You’re just in time, Romstead; I was about to start without you.”

Mayo, whose real first name was Martha, was thirty-three, divorced, a creamy-skinned brunette with eyes that were very near to violet, and a registered nurse who’d always wanted to be a doctor but hadn’t quite been able to make it into medical school after four years of premed at Berkeley. In spite of the med-school turndowns, she was only mildly hung up on women’s lib, but she was a dedicated McGovernite and a passionate advocate of civil rights and environmental causes. She was also sexy as hell and possessed of a vocabulary that could raise welts on a Galapagos tortoise, as Romstead had learned early in their acquaintance when he’d jokingly called her a knee-jerk liberal. So far he had asked her at least three times to marry him, but she had refused, always gently, but decisively. Her first marriage had been a disaster, and she had reservations about him as a candidate for a second attempt.

He turned now and looked at her. She lay on her back, nude beside him in the faint illumination of the bedroom, totally relaxed, fluid, and pliant, a composition in chiaroscuro with the soft gleam of the thighs and the triangular wedge of velvet black at their juncture, the dark nipples of the spread and flattened breasts, pale blur of face, and the dark hair and the shadows of her eyes. This began to excite him again, and he turned and kissed her softly on the throat. It was after two in the morning now, and they had made love three times already, the last time very slowly and lingeringly, during which she had had a whole series of convulsive orgasms. Well, you could always try.

She pushed his hand away. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, calling your father a stud.”

“Cut it out. I haven’t slept with another woman since I met you.”

“Well, I should hope not. I don’t see how you could work one into your schedule.”

“It’s just that I’ve been three weeks at sea. And I’m crazy about you.”

She reached over on the nightstand and lighted a cigarette. The tip glowed red in the darkness. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Wait a few minutes and try again.”

“Oh,
that
I know. If there’d been even the faintest doubt you’d keep trying, I’d have engulfed you like a Venus flytrap. You poor innocent, growing up in military schools.” She puffed on the cigarette. Her nipples looked purple in the glow. “I mean, what are you going to do about your father and the money he left you?”

“Three things,” he replied. “I thought about it all the way driving down tonight. I’ll tell you the third one first, since it involves you. Instead of selling them, for a change I’m going to buy a boat. I mean, one whole hell of a lot of boat. Money will be no problem. I get about a hundred and fifty thousand from the estate, and I’ve got a little over that myself, savings and so on and the money I got for my franchise in Costa Rica—”

“You mean from the CIA.”

“Are you still on that? I tell you I was working for myself.”

“All right, all right, you were just an innocent businessman. Go on about the boat.”

“Say a thirty-five to forty-foot ketch, which is about all two people can handle without having to work too hard at it. Everything on it—self-steering vane, radiotelephone, fathometer, Kenyon log, diesel auxiliary, tanks for a cruising range of four hundred miles under power, generator, refrigerator. You can do all that with a fairly small boat if you’re just putting in cruising accommodations for two, and you can do it for sixty thousand or less.

“We’ll take a long cruise, down the west coast as far as Panama, across to the Galapagos, back up to Hawaii, and then out through the Marianas and Carolines. How about it?”

“Mmmmm—I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Why?”

“Let’s don’t go into that now. What are the other two things you’re going to do?”

“The first is I’m going to find that son of a bitch who murdered the old man. And then I’m going to light one of those Havana cigars and smoke it very slowly right down to the end while he’s begging me to call the police.”

“And you wonder why I’m doubtful about marrying you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re just as arrogant and self-sufficient and ruthless as he was. Make up your own laws, and the hell with civilization.”

“You ever hear of a place called Murmansk?” he asked.

“Sure. It’s a Russian seaport in the Arctic. Why?”

He tried to tell her—dispassionately, of course, since this was hardly the setting for the kind of cold rage that had kept growing in him driving down from Nevada—tried to tell her of the gales, the snow, sleet, ships solidly encased in ice, dive-bomber attacks, submarine wolf packs, and the eternal, pitiless cold that could kill a man in the water in minutes. He hadn’t known any of this at the time, of course; he was only a very young boy leading a very easy existence in an upper-class Havana suburb, but he’d learned it later through reading about those convoy runs in World War II and what it was like to carry aviation gasoline and high explosives up across the top of the world while the Germans and the merciless Barents Sea did their level best to kill you. His father had done it, for months on end, along with a lot of other men who could have found cozier backwaters to ride out the war if they’d tried.

“He was out there taking his chances where some real hairy people were gunning for him, and then he winds up on a garbage dump, tied up and blindfolded so some chickenshit punk can shoot him in the back of the head.”

“Well, the police are looking for them, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Oh, sure. After a fashion, and for the wrong people for the wrong motives.”

“What do you mean?”

“The heroin angle. I think the whole thing was a plant. And it worked, at least so far. They got just the situation they wanted: The sheriff’s department in Coleville has jurisdiction because that’s where it happened, but they’re convinced the crime was committed by professional hoodlums from San Francisco. The San Francisco police will help as much as they can, but they’re not about to run a temperature over a dead man in Nevada; they’ve got a dead man of their own—a whole morgue full of ‘em and more coming in by the hour. We’ll be in touch, fellas; how’s the weather up there? And neither police force, Coleville
or
San Francisco, is going to start a crusade over a rubbed-out heroin dealer: Well, that’s one son of a bitch we don’t have to contend with anymore; they ought to do it more often.”

“Then you think he was killed for that money he drew out of the bank? Somebody knew about it.”

“No. He was forced to draw it out of the bank; and then the same people killed him. You can futz around with it until you’re blue in the face, and you’ll never make a case for his having drawn that money out voluntarily.”

“You mean extortion?” she asked. “A threat of some kind?”

“Right.”

“But how? They said he came into the bank alone. What was to keep him from calling the police?”

“Richter just has to be wrong about it, that’s all. Somebody was covering him, and they missed it. What other forms of extortion are there? He was too tough to pay blackmail, even if they had something really serious on him, which I don’t believe for a minute. Kidnap? I’m the only family he had, and nobody tried to kidnap me.”

“Maybe they’d read ‘The Ransom of Red Chief,’ “ she said.

“Smartass.”

“How are you going to find out?”

“Go talk to Richter and Winegaard, to begin with.”

“Did they teach you investigative techniques in the CIA? Or just interrogation—the iron maiden—bastinado?”

“Will you cut it out? CIA!”

“Didn’t you know you talk in your sleep?”

“I do?”

“Scared you, didn’t I? Well, you do, but it’s always in Spanish. I’ve been thinking of enrolling at Berlitz.”

“I’m probably talking to the other drivers; Berlitz doesn’t teach that kind of Spanish. Anyway, why wouldn’t I speak it? My mother was Cuban, and I lived in Havana most of the time until I was fourteen, when she died.”

“I know. And then you gave up a career in professional baseball to become a stodgy old businessman in Latin America—”

“You’d be surprised how easy it is for a catcher hitting one sixty to give up a career in professional baseball.”

“Stop interrupting me. And this was just before the Bay of Pigs. Odd, wasn’t it?”

“If I plead guilty to all charges, can I make love to you again?”

“Well—”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Why didn’t I think of copping out before? Did you know I also fomented the Boxer Rebellion and started the War of Jenkins’ Ear?”

He arose a little before nine, showered and shaved as quietly as he could, and took a fresh suit and the rest of his clothes out into the living room to dress. This was accomplished with only one or two drowsy mutters from the depths of Mayo’s pillow, largely undistinguishable except for something about a goddamned rhinoceros.

He expected to find the kitchen barren of anything edible, the way he’d left it when he had taken off for Baja California, but discovered she’d restocked it, at least for breakfast. He put on coffee, mixed some orange juice, and toasted a cinnamon roll in the broiler of the oven. It would be an hour yet before the bank opened, so he’d have time to talk to Winegaard first. He looked up the number and dialed. Yes, the secretary said, Mr. Winegaard was in and would be glad to see Mr. Romstead. In about fifteen minutes. He scribbled a note to Mayo saying he’d be back before noon and walked over to Montgomery Street. It was a sunny morning, at least downtown, but cool enough to be typical of San Francisco’s summer.

There was a customer’s room with a number of desks and big armchairs where men were watching stock quotations on a board, with the partners’ offices at the rear of it. Edward Winegaard’s was large and expensively carpeted, with a massive desk, and a mounted Pacific sailfish on one wall. Winegaard was a man near his father’s age, trim and in good shape and tanned, with conservatively cut silvery hair. He arose to shake hands and indicated the armchair before his desk.

“It was a very tragic thing,” he said. “And I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all.”

“Neither do I,” Romstead replied. “But all I’ve had so far is secondhand information, which is why I wanted to talk to you. You’ve known him for a long time?”

“Twenty—ah—twenty-seven years now.”

“Then there’s no question he made that money in the stock market?”

“None at all. Why?”

“The police seem to have some doubt of it.”

“I don’t see why. It was quite easy, looking at it in retrospect; anybody with a good job and a little money to invest every month could have done it. All he’d have to do is study stocks the way your father did.” He smiled faintly, like a man remembering some golden age that was gone. “And get into the market when the Dow was in the two hundred to three hundred range, good solid shares were selling at five or six times earnings, and the big glamour issues were still to come.

“I first met him in New York in 1945. I’d just got out of the Army and was with Merrill Lynch. He had about twelve thousand dollars in savings and what I thought were very sound ideas on how he wanted to invest it. I’ve handled his business ever since. We had arguments, plenty of them—most of which he won—and I’ll have to admit that more than half the time he was right.

“Traditionally, you think of shipmasters and seamen as shellbacks and old fogies about a century behind the times, but in the matter of investments Captain Romstead was oriented toward the future all the way. He believed in the new technology—electronics especially, computers, and aerospace. He’d been a radioman himself—”

“I didn’t know that,” Romstead said.

“Yes. You see, when he first got his officer’s papers, he was still sailing in Norwegian ships, before he became a U. S. citizen. And in those days it was quite common—as he explained it to me—for one of the mates of a Norwegian ship to double as wireless operator. So he had both tickets then.

“It was more or less natural then—especially after he started sailing out of here—for him to see the potentialities of the new electronics issues like Ampex, Varian, and Hewlett-Packard. He also bought IBM and Xerox at prices—and before multiple splits—that would make strong men break down and cry if you started talking about them now. And of course, shipmasters were making very good salaries by then; he was working steadily and buying more stock all the time. His portfolio was worth a million or a little over as far back as 1965.”

“Good,” Romstead said. “Now, for the second part—the pruning job when he liquidated that two hundred and fifty thousand. How does that jibe with your twenty-seven years’ experience with him?”

“It doesn’t,” Winegaard said flatly. “As my grandchildren would say—no way.”

“It was that bad?”

“A child with a pair of scissors could have done just as well.” Winegaard took from his desk a list consisting of three pages clipped together. “This is a copy of our latest statement to him—that is, the shares we held for him in street name. What he did was simply to sell everything on the first page, except for one minor item at the bottom of it. Without going into detail about it, this included two issues we’d bought for him only the week before and that we were very high on, and another he’d had for less than a month and that was performing even better than we’d expected. It makes no sense at all that he would sell these.

“And on the next two pages there were three stocks we’d already more than halfway decided to unload. Approximately the same amount of money involved, around ninety thousand. I argued with him, or tried to, but he cut me off very abruptly. He didn’t want to argue about it, he said. Sell at the market opening and deposit the proceeds in his checking account as soon as possible.”

Romstead was conscious of growing excitement. Now they were getting somewhere. “Well, look—did he specifically mention the sum two hundred and fifty thousand as the amount he needed?”

“No, he didn’t. He’d know, of course, from the previous closing quotations within a few thousand what the list would bring—barring some upheaval in the market overnight. Actually, the proceeds after commission came to something a little over two hundred and fifty-three thousand.”