Murder Alfresco #3 (12 page)

Other than fingerprint dust, the house looked more or less in order. If the police had scrutinized the premises as thoroughly as the harbormaster said, they’d done an excellent job of putting everything back in place. Sunny made a mental note not to leave any fingerprints behind, if possible, just in case.

Joel Hyder opened the French doors
. “The first order of business is a toast.”

He went back to the kitchen for glasses. Sunny and Rivka stood on the deck taking in the view in the warmth of the midday sun, grateful to be away from the cold wind at the beach.

“My mom used to listen to Alan Watts on the radio,” said Sunny. “A long time ago, when I was little. He was a Zen Buddhist. I think he lived here. Sometimes he would mention his houseboat in Sausalito and how they had swinging parties all the time. It was all very groovy.”

Joel came back and opened the bottle of Champagne. He poured three glasses. “To Heidi. May she journey in peace, free from the menace.” His face flushed red and clinched up with the effort to control his emotions. “From the menace that ended her adventures in this world.” He set his jaw bitterly with the final words.

They drank and Joel went and sat down on the edge of the deck, facing away from them. He shook his head at some thought and wiped his eyes hard with the back of his hand. Finally he got up and refilled their glasses, then took a seat in a low canvas deck chair and sighed, smiling, his determination to
enjoy himself renewed. Rivka sat down against the wall and Sunny took the other canvas chair.

They watched the water and the houseboats on the next dock over, and beyond them, Mount Tam. A woman in a canoe glided past, paddling the calm water with smooth, silent strokes. Overhead, a quintet of pelicans cruised west toward the open sea. There was the sound of water lapping against wood, the creaking of hulls against their concrete moorings, the occasional cry of a seagull, the distant ringing of a telephone. Sunny and Rivka took off their shoes and rolled up their jeans.

“This is heaven,” said Rivka.

“The perfect Sunday afternoon,” said Sunny.

“Glad you like it,” said Joel.

They made another toast to Heidi’s memory, drank, and finished the bottle. Joel got up and came back with a guitar, which he began to strum. It was all exceedingly pleasant. Sunny’s mind drifted to slow, easy thoughts, few of which involved Heidi Romero. They slumped lower and let the sound of the guitar stand for all activity.

“I can’t move,” said Rivka. “I think maybe I should go look for some sunscreen, but I don’t think I have the strength.”

“Me too. It’s the Champagne,” said Sunny.

“And the heat.”

“We should eat something before we lose the will to survive.”

They went into the kitchen. Sunny examined the photographs stuck to the refrigerator. Snapshots of Heidi with friends and family offered the typical evidence of a brief, happy existence. Photographs taken with friends on road trips, at the beach, with her arms around family at her graduation.

“I hope she didn’t drink this stuff,” said Rivka, holding up a bottle with a snake coiled inside it, its white belly pressed against
the glass. Other bottles contained a frog, a worm, and a cricket. “Where did she get them?”

“Vietnam?” said Sunny, pointing to a photograph of Heidi on the back of a moped being driven through a Southeast Asian village by a local boy in a white button-down shirt. Sunny took a dishtowel and opened the refrigerator. The inventory included soy milk, flaxseed, tempeh, lecithin, plain yogurt, soy sauce, oranges, and an assortment of wilted vegetables. She wondered what happened to the food in the refrigerator of a woman who is killed. Probably it would fall to Joel Hyder to clean it out eventually. She opened a cabinet. Green tea, honey, brown rice, oatmeal, a head of garlic. A wooden bowl on the counter held three apples and a lemon.

“Health food,” said Sunny. “Hardcore.” She opened the bottle of pink wine and carried it and the baguette out to the deck. Rivka followed with a cutting board heaped with the rest of the food they’d bought. They sliced the papaya in half. The light made its naked orange flesh unspeakably beautiful, and the hold of glossy black seeds shone like caviar. Sunny tore off a piece of baguette and loaded it with cheese.

“Salmon?” said Rivka, holding a dish of smoked fish out to Joel.

“No, thanks. I’m a vegetarian,” he said.

“No meat at all?”

“Nope.”

“How can you stand it?” said Rivka. “I would lose my mind if I had to face a lifetime without bacon, not to mention all the other succulent parts of the noble pig.”

“To the pig,” said Sunny. “Long may he reign.”

“To our delicious friend,” said Rivka.

“What did it?” asked Sunny, turning to Joel. “Did you just wake up one day and decide not to eat meat?”

“You could say that. I’ve been vegetarian since I lived in Japan. We went out to dinner one night at a very expensive sushi restaurant. The best in town. Their specialty was a certain kind of fish that they kept alive while they flayed it, right there at the table, so it would be really fresh. I had a mentor at the time who I considered very wise. I told him about how upsetting that dinner was for me, and he suggested I perform an experiment. He said I should go to the open-air market and buy two live sardines. Just two tiny little fish. One I should keep until I was really hungry, then I should kill it and fry it with some nice oil and lemon and eat it. The other I should again keep until I was very hungry, then I should take it to the harbor and set it free. The idea was to see which of the two gestures made me feel better. The first sardine was great, especially since I was so hungry, but the second one changed my mind. I’ll never forget seeing it shoot away into the water. I’ve never eaten meat since.”

Sunny stared at the bread and cheese in her hands. “I had a dream kind of like that.”

“Like what?”

“I dreamed I was eating a fish that was still alive. It was looking up at me while I cut into it.”

“Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something,” said Joel.

“Maybe the fish is,” said Rivka.

“When did you live in Japan?” said Sunny.

“Three years ago, after Heidi and I broke up. I sort of needed a change of scenery.” He put down the guitar and refilled his glass of wine. “What do you suppose happened to her, anyway? Do you think we’ll ever know?”

“She ran into somebody bad,” said Sunny. “She crossed paths with the wrong person.”

“It sounds like you believe in pure evil.” He leaned toward her, his eyes growing intense. “I mean evil for evil’s sake. Not accidental badness or ordinary malice or anything understandable. Do you?” He didn’t wait for her to reply. “Because I think it does exist. I’ve seen it, and felt it.” He sat back in the canvas chair and savored his thoughts. “I’ll tell you something. I used to play football in high school. The coach was a big disciplinarian and ran a tight ship. He wouldn’t let us drink or smoke or even swear. If he found out we did, we were off the team, no questions asked. It was all about strength and discipline. We thought of ourselves as a kind of elite corps, and we took pride in our clean living. I played defensive end. It was my job to break through the line and bring down the other team’s quarterback. What you realize pretty quickly in that position is that you have to be aggressive, not just to win, but to keep from getting hurt. Collisions are not equal. One person delivers the blow, the other takes it. That was lesson number one: Always make the hit. If it looks like you are going to be involved in a violent situation, make sure you are the perpetrator of that violence, not the recipient. The other lesson was that the sensation of colliding with another body hard enough to rattle your bones and addle your head starts to feel good after a while. It sounds funny, but it’s true. That shock of collision is painful at first, but over time it starts to feel good. Pretty soon you crave it, like a drug. Every once in a while I still get that hunger to crush an opponent, hammer him into the ground, and feel the crunch of bones and pads giving way underneath me. I think that’s the nature of evil. When you start to crave that kind of power and release.”

“That sounds more like testosterone than pure evil,” said Rivka. “Or maybe some very old instinct being woken up. The inner Stone Age hunter. I think of evil as having to do more
with coercion. The guy who tackles you to hear your bones crunch is a badass. The guy who tells you he’s your best friend, then seduces your wife and teaches your kid not to trust you, that’s evil.”

“What I can’t figure out is how they overpowered her,” said Joel. “She was in great shape. It would have taken somebody strong.”

“Maybe they didn’t overpower her,” said Sunny. “She was more likely tricked or drugged. Or maybe they had a gun. It’s old-fashioned, but it still works. The gun is the great equalizer.” Sunny studied Joel Hyder. She had a growing list of questions in her head for him, but she didn’t want to put him on his guard. The trick was to get to them little by little. She decided to start with an easy one. “Why’d you two break up anyway?”

Joel yawned. He put down his wineglass and picked up the guitar. He played it softly. “We just seemed better as friends. I’m a decade older than her, plus some. At the time, we thought that mattered. I’m not so sure anymore.”

“I think it matters,” said Rivka. “I broke up with my last boyfriend for that reason. You have different priorities.”

“What about recently,” said Sunny. “Was she seeing anybody?”

Joel closed his eyes and rearranged his feet on the lip of the tugboat’s deck. “She didn’t have what you’d call a boyfriend, per se. For some reason, she didn’t consider the guy she was seeing as boyfriend material. He seemed to be away most weekends, for one thing. She’d see him on Wednesday afternoons, Monday nights, like that. She never talked about him much.”

“He was B list,” said Rivka.

“Maybe even C, but there was nobody in the A and B slots as far as I know,” said Joel, “and I think I would know.”

“Maybe he was the one calling the shots and she was his B-list girl,” said Sunny. “Did you ever meet him?”

Joel shook his head. “All I know is his name was Mark.” He scowled. “Aren’t you guys boiling? You should go upstairs and find some shorts. I saw a pair hanging on the towel rack in the bathroom and there’s sure to be another pair somewhere.”

“That’s just a little too weird,” said Sunny.

“It is really hot,” said Rivka.

They climbed the stairs and found two pairs of board shorts without looking very hard. They changed out of their jeans and reemerged on the back deck, barefoot and wearing straw hats from the collection on the wall.

“That’s better,” said Joel. “You look good in her clothes. Jeans are a crime on a day like today.” He went on softly playing the guitar, humming along occasionally. After a while, a neighbor started to play the piano. They could hear the notes as though the piano were directly in front of them. Joel put the guitar aside. A parrot screeched.

“That’s Chopin,” he said.

“I think it might be Mozart,” said Sunny.

“I mean the parrot. The woman who plays the piano puts her parrot outside when she practices. His name is Chopin.”

They sprawled on the back deck listening to the music. Rivka yawned and got up to investigate the rattling, metallic sound interfering with the piano’s notes.

“It’s shopping carts,” she said. “People pushing shopping carts up and down the dock.”

“They leave two of them at the entrance,” said Joel. “For carrying groceries and garbage and anything heavy.” The sun got hotter and the relaxed, foggy feeling from the wine gave way to a sticky lethargy.

“I could use a shot of espresso,” said Sunny. “I’m so sleepy.” Joel heaved himself upright. “Me too. All there is is green tea. You guys must know Heidi didn’t do coffee.”

Rivka glanced at Sunny.

“I knew she took good care of herself,” said Sunny, “but that kitchen is stocked with serious health food.”

“She was hardcore. No meat, no dairy, no coffee, no refined sugar.”

“Wow.”

Joel pressed a finger to his forearm, checking for sunburn. He went inside and they heard his muffled voice from the front deck, apparently making a call. He came back with a bottle of sunscreen. “It’s getting late. Should we go for a canoe ride before we take off?”

“Definitely,” said Rivka.

The canoe was turned upside down on the dock directly below the sun deck. They flipped it into the water and climbed aboard. Joel and Sunny took up paddles while Rivka arranged herself in the stern, trailing a hand in the water. They paddled out to the end of the dock and into the channel, then explored the next dock over.

Joel suggested they make a loop, paddling between houses. They glided past downstairs windows almost at eye level, catching glimpses of a bedroom, a man at work at his desk, a woman putting away laundry. At the dock, they ducked down, lifting up wires as they slipped underneath with just enough room between the water and the wooden beams. At Liberty Dock, they chose a wide passage a couple of houses down from Heidi’s. One house had all the curtains drawn. In the other, the man who liked to take out the trash was sitting stiffly on a couch watching cartoons with his sweater still around his shoulders and his headphones on. Sunny looked away, embarrassed to have invaded his privacy.

They paddled back out to the main channel and swung around the tip of Liberty Dock and back in the other side. They
spotted the police officers standing at the tugboat’s door about the same time the police officers spotted them. Sunny stopped paddling.

“Don’t stop,” said Joel softly, without turning around. “Just keep paddling, slowly, like nothing is wrong.”

Rivka sat up, turning to face the group of officers now watching the canoe’s approach.

They could hear the police knocking
on the door while they hastily pulled the canoe out of the water and turned it upside down on the dock. Joel Hyder led the way inside. He opened the front door and stepped outside, closing it behind him. Sunny and Rivka went upstairs to change. A moment later, they heard Joel come back in. He shouted up to them from the living room. “They want to see you both. And they need IDs.”