Sand Dollars (18 page)

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Authors: Charles Knief

BOOK: Sand Dollars
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The rain stopped and the clouds blew away, leaving behind a chilled but clear evening and the promise of a fair morning. Slanting sunlight reflected brightly off rain pools puddling the docks.
I sat on the stern rail of the
Olympia
, smoking my second Cuban cigar and thinking about my next move. It seemed a wasteful extravagance to smoke forty dollars' worth of Esplendidos in a single afternoon. On the other hand, it wasn't as if I'd never get a chance to buy another one. I knew I was going to pass that little tobacco shop tomorrow and every day after that until Lorena Garcia came out and I could follow her.
Following the woman seemed the only thing to do. I couldn't think of another angle. Anything else would be counterproductive. Stakeouts and tailing were my least favorite investigative techniques, but they were paying off in this case. Besides, how many of us, other than the Kennedys, ever get to do what we want all the time?
“Are you always this chummy?”
I turned. Behind me, Barbara Klein leaned against the cabin wall. She looked good, wearing a gray Banana Republic sweatshirt and Tommy Hilfigers. I had thought her hair was brown, but the afternoon sun caught highlights of red and auburn, and myriad colors in between.
“It's too crowded below,” I said. “I needed air. And I needed to think. How are you holding up?”
“We get to play a lot of canasta,” she said, a little ruefully. “I may never play canasta again, after this.”
“Days get a little long when it rains,” I said.
“You could say that. You're gone all the time. You don't know what it's like here.”
I could picture it. Confinement is never attractive to an active person. But it was keeping them all alive.
“How's Claire?”
“Claire's starting to get on …” Barbara shook the hair from her eyes, covering an abrupt change of mind. “She's fine.”
“How are you and she getting along with Ed?”
“He's distant, but that's just Ed, I think. He comes and goes. When he goes, Mr. Farrell is here. They never leave us alone. And Ed always has that shotgun with him.”
“Two armed and dangerous grandfathers. Or great-grandfathers. I think Farrell has two or three great-grandchildren.”
She shivered. “Yeah. The Over the Hill Gang.”
“Not quite over the hill.”
A flight of brown pelicans glided over the marina in V formation, wing tip to wing tip. They changed direction, riding unseen air currents, without apparent communication. I watched, fascinated. The last time I'd been here, brown pelicans were an endangered species, their eggs destroyed by pesticides. Now the big seabirds were common again along the coast. They must have done some prodigious mating while I was gone.
Good for them.
“Juanita seems better than when I got here,” Barbara said. I nodded agreement. At dinner, the little housekeeper's smile had been back in place.
“She's getting over what happened at the house. I think she feels safe with you and Ed around, and she really likes Mr. Farrell. He treats her like a daughter.”
I nodded. I'd noticed that, too.
“We're just bored, but we're not complaining. Still, I wonder when this will be over.”
“I think it will be over soon,” I said. “A week. No more.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean that?”
“We're making progress.” I had no absolute proof of
Lorena Garcia's participation. Only a feeling. Except that feeling buzzed like a bad transformer.
“You think you know where the money is?”
I shook my head. “Not even close. But I may be close to someone who does.”
“I spoke with Joe today. He said Claire was just wasting her money hiring you. He was emphatic. He said Claire doesn't have much money left, the company isn't making any, and if the government seizes her assets, she won't have anything left at all.”
“That true?”
She nodded. “She's fine for a while, unless they start taking her apart. And it could happen any time. If they do, she won't have anything to pay you with.”
“Or him.”
“He mentioned that, too.”
“He ask where she is?”
“Uh-huh. I didn't tell him.”
“Good.”
She studied my face. “You have more than just one reason for saying that, don't you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you don't want to tell me, do you?”
“No.”
“No? Or not yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I can live with that,” she said. “It makes me trust you.”
“Why?”
“You're protecting Claire from something. You can confide in me, you know, but if you don't feel comfortable with that, I understand. But I know that you're keeping your thoughts to yourself so you don't hurt anybody.”
“Wow,” I said. “You're good.”
“You're protecting Claire because it's about Paul, and you don't want to hurt her any more than Paul already did. Isn't that it?”
I said nothing. I didn't need to.
“You've found the other woman, haven't you?”
I looked toward the entrance of the harbor where Point Loma met the Pacific. Someday soon I'd take
Olympia
out there and head home. I wished I could go right now.
“Aren't you glad this rain is finally over?” I asked.
She slugged me in the arm. “Okay,” she said. “You've got your reasons. But you just confirmed what I already knew. And,” she said, bringing her face close to mine, “what Claire already knows, too.”
“I don't have anything,” I said. “But I think I have a link with a woman who may or may not have been with Paul. It seems likely. I can't prove it. Not even to myself.”
“And so you're watching her.”
“And so I'm watching her. And there's something else. She may be tied to Claire's attorney.”
“How do you know?”
“Wheels within wheels. They are all tied together somehow. I don't know how, but they are. I've got the end of a string and I'm pulling it until it all unravels. So far I found one end tied to Stevenson and one end tangled around a woman in Tijuana who fits the description of a woman in San Diego who might have been involved with Claire's husband. It's nothing, yet it's something.” I was not going to tell her about the gang kid. I had no idea how he fit, and I didn't want to scare her. The implications of his presence after the shooting in Claire's living room were scary, even for me.
“That's what you've been doing? Following people?” She moved close to me. I found it pleasant, not something I wanted to avoid.
“That's all,” I said, listening to my voice as if it belonged to someone else. “Sitting and watching and waiting for something to happen. And when it does, I follow to see where they go. It's not as interesting as canasta, but I get to listen to talk radio, and I get to see some interesting landscape I'd probably never see otherwise.”
Barbara's hands closed on my forearms. I could almost feel her heat through the leather.
“And tomorrow,” I continued, “I'm planting myself near
the woman's house. When she comes out, I'm going to follow her.”
She stepped away and stared at me, giving me the hard look. “If you find the money, I don't want you to tell Stevenson.”
“That never entered my mind,” I said. In fact, I'd already thought to ask Ed Thomas for the name of another attorney. Maybe two, a tax attorney and one who sues other lawyers. Set one shark on another. Play a little game of “Let's You and Him Fight.”
“I came up to see how you were. You seemed so distant during dinner, I thought something was wrong. I feel better now, after our talk. And I really needed the air, too. Claire was getting on my nerves.”
“I thought you were friends.”
“She can wear thin, even so. We're all confined in a tight space where personality conflicts magnify. Here, give me a hand.” She climbed onto the transom and sat beside me, hooking her feet inside the railing. “Claire sometimes acts like a spoiled child. She's had it very good for a long, long time, and she expects that her money and her position will continue. She doesn't hear the pounding at the gate.
“She's in a position where she could lose everything. Claire's a tough woman. She's weathered this whole thing with Paul. She was the one who asked me to find somebody like you. I didn't force her. Yet, just before you got to the restaurant, she wanted to leave. Sometimes I think she really doesn't want to know the truth.”
I nodded, but kept silent, listening intently.
“I've never trusted Stevenson. Now you tell me he might be involved. That would not surprise me, but it would Claire, and it would devastate her right now.”
“How?”
Barbara shook her head. “I'm not supposed to know, but Claire and Stevenson had an affair about a year ago, about the time that Paul began distancing himself from her. It may have started earlier, but it continued until Paul's disappearance.
Then they broke it off. Suddenly. I don't know which of them did it, but there was some pain.
“Don't you see? Every man she's been in contact with lately has betrayed her. First Paul, then Joe. And there's you.”
“Me?”
“She told me about your relaxation technique the other night, your
Lomi Lomi
massage? And she told me you've turned her down twice now. That's a record for Claire. She's not used to it. You've become a target, Mr. Caine. The more you turn her down, the more attractive you become.”
“I didn't do it for that reason.”
“That may be true, but it doesn't change Claire.”
“You don't know much about me,” I told her softly, bordering on a subject I did not want to revisit, yet plunging ahead. Somehow, it was the right place and the right time and the right woman. “About a year ago I was in love. I lost my Kate a few months before Claire lost her husband. She's still with me, most nights. I don't think I could do Claire, or anybody else, any good until she leaves, you know?”
“I didn't know,” she said.
“It's okay. It happened so fast, the love and then the death, there wasn't the time to enjoy the good before the bad took its place. I wasn't in the right place to help her, and when I was in the right place, it was the wrong time. Too little, too late, that was my curse.”
“Claire said you'd offered to take her to Hawaii.”
“That's right. Letting her down easy.”
“She'll never go with you.”
“I sincerely hope she doesn't,” I said. “But if she wants to come, I've made the offer. It's up to her.”
Barbara looked at me in a way I'd come to know: She cocked her head and stared when she didn't get the answer she expected, as if turning her head would bring her a new perspective, a different dimension of empathy. “It's up to her,” she said, the sentence ending in a flat monotone, although it was a question and not the flat declarative statement it resembled.
“He said, hoping she will not take him up on it,” I laughed, hoping she would get the joke.
“Claire's a good person. I'm not disloyal. But I thought I should warn you.” Barbara's face was turned toward mine, our shoulders touching. I could feel her body heat through my jacket and her sweatshirt and it was a pleasant touch, something I had missed.
Then she leaned over and kissed me. I guess it was supposed to be a sisterly kind of kiss, but our mouths found each other and suddenly I was kissing and being kissed back by a healthy, passionate woman. It was the kind of kiss that makes your toes curl. She put her arms around me and I enfolded her into an embrace, her body molding its way into mine as if the molecules of her flesh knew exactly where they belonged.
We parted, breathless, and stared at each other.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow, too,” she said.
“You'd better get below while you still can.”
She nodded. “You think your Kate would approve?”
“I think so.”
“So where does this leave us?”
“Nowhere. Until this thing is done.”
“I thought you'd say that,” she said, kissing me again, a gentle kiss this time, on the cheek above my beard. “You've got some white ones in there, Mister Caine,” she said, running her fingertips through the bristled hair on my chin. It tingled where she touched me.

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