Snow Falling on Cedars (32 page)

Judge Lew Fielding pinched the tip of his nose. ‘I don’t know, Art,’ he said. ‘First of all, you’ve got Horace’s off-the-cuff-statement regarding a coincidental resemblance between this wound in Carl Heine’s head and ones he saw inflicted by Japanese soldiers – now does
that
really point us toward Miyamoto? You’ve got Etta Heine, who I won’t go into, but suffice it to say I don’t trust that woman. She’s hateful, Art; I don’t trust her. And you’ve got at least fifty gill-netters out in the fog last night – any one of them as contentious as the next when he figures some other guy is cutting into his fish – and then you’ve got Ole Jurgensen. And I admit Ole is interesting. I admit you’ve got something worth thinking about with Ole. But – ’

‘Judge,’ Art Moran cut in, ‘can I say something? If you think about it
too
long we’ll lose our chance altogether. The boats’ll be going out soon.’

The judge pulled his sleeve back and squinted at his watch. ‘Five-twenty,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

‘I’ve got an affidavit here,’ the sheriff pressed on, pulling it free of his shirt pocket. ‘I did it up fast, but it’s right, Judge. Lays it all out plain and simple. What I want to look for is a murder weapon, that’s all, if there’s a chance of that.’

‘Well,’ replied Lew Fielding. ‘No harm, I suppose, if you do it properly, Art.’ He leaned across his desk toward the sheriff. ‘And for technicality’s sake let’s make
this
move, too: do you swear that the facts in this affidavit are true, so help you God – do you
swear?’

The sheriff did.

‘All right. You bring a warrant?’

The sheriff produced one from the opposite shirt pocket; the judge unfolded it beneath his desk lamp and picked up his fountain pen. ‘I’m going to put this down,’ he said. ‘I’m going to allow you to search the boat but not Miyamoto’s house. No intruding on his wife and children, I don’t see there’s any hurry to do something like that. And remember, now, this is a
limited
search. The murder weapon, Art, and nothing else. I won’t have you running roughshod over this man’s privacy.’

‘Got it,’ Art Moran said. ‘The murder weapon.’

‘You don’t find anything on the boat, come see me in the morning. We’ll talk about his house at that point.’

‘All right,’ said Art Moran. ‘Thanks.’

He asked, then, if he might use the telephone. He dialed his office and spoke with Eleanor Dokes. ‘Have Abel meet me down to the docks,’ he said. ‘And tell him to bring along his flashlight.’

San Piedro fishermen, in 1954, were apt to pay attention to signs and portents other men had no inkling of. For them the web of cause and effect was invisible and simultaneously everywhere, which was why a man could sink his net with salmon one night and catch only kelp the next. Tides, currents, and winds were one thing, the force of luck another. A fisherman didn’t utter the
words horse, pig, or hog on the deck of a gill-netter, for to do so was to bring bad weather down around his head or cause a line to foul in his propeller. Turning a hatch cover upside down brought a southwest storm, and bringing a black suitcase on board meant snarled gear and twisted webbing. Those who harmed seagulls risked the wrath of ship ghosts, for gulls were inhabited by the spirits of men who had been lost at sea in accidents. Umbrellas, too, were bad business, as were broken mirrors and the gift of a pair of scissors. On board a purse seiner only a greenhorn would ever think to trim his fingernails while sitting on a seine pile, or hand a shipmate a bar of soap as opposed to dropping it into his washbasin, or cut the bottom end off a can of fruit. Bad fishing and bad weather could result from any of these.

Kabuo Miyamoto, as he came up the south dock toward his boat that evening – carrying a battery for the
Islander
– saw a flock of seagulls perched on his net drum and stabilizer bars and sitting atop his cabin. When he moved to board they lofted themselves skyward, thirty or forty birds, it appeared at first, a clamor of wings, more of them than he imagined possible, half a hundred seagulls rising from the
Islander
, exploding out of her cockpit. They circled overhead a half-dozen times in arcs that took in the entire breadth of the docks, then settled on the swells to seaward.

Kabuo’s heart worked hard in his chest. He was not particularly given to omens, but on the other hand he had never seen this before.

He went in and pried up the battery well cover. He slid his new battery into place and bolted the cables to it. Finally he started his boat engine. He let it run, then flicked the toggle for the number-one pump in order to run his deck hose. Kabuo stood on the edge of the hatch cover and washed gull droppings out the scupper holes. The gulls had disturbed his equilibrium, put him ill at ease. Other boats were pulling out, he saw, motoring past the buoys in Amity Harbor on their way to the salmon grounds. He looked at his watch; five-forty already. It occurred to him to try his luck
at Ship Channel that evening; the good sets would be taken at Elliot Head.

When he looked up a lone gull had perched arrogantly on the port gunnel ten feet away and to stern. It was pearl gray and white winged, a young herring gull with a wide, flaring breast, and it seemed to be watching him, too.

Kabuo reached back delicately and turned the hose valve full open. The water shot harder against the aft deck and ricocheted to stern. When he had fixed in on the gull again he watched it for a moment out of the corners of his eyes, then shifted his weight to the left swiftly and aimed his hose at it. The stream caught the surprised bird broadside in the breast, and while it struggled to escape from the force of the water its head smashed against the gunnel of the
Channel Star
, which was moored in the adjacent berth.

Kabuo, the hose still in his hand, was standing beside the port gunnel staring at the dying gull when Art Moran and Abel Martinson appeared beside his boat, both carrying flashlights.

The sheriff, twice, slashed a hand across his throat. ‘Cut your engine,’ he called.

‘What for?’ asked Kabuo Miyamoto.

‘I’ve got a warrant,’ replied the sheriff, and took it out of his shirt pocket. ‘We’re going to search your boat tonight.’

Kabuo blinked at him, and then his face hardened. He shut the nozzle off and looked the sheriff in the eye. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked.

‘I don’t have any idea,’ said the sheriff. ‘It might take quite a while.’

‘Well, what are you looking for?’ asked Kabuo Miyamoto.

‘A murder weapon,’ answered Art Moran. ‘We think you might be responsible for the death of Carl Heine.’

Kabuo blinked a second time and dropped the hose to the deck. ‘I didn’t kill Carl Heine,’ he insisted. ‘It wasn’t me, sheriff’

‘Then you won’t mind us searching, will you?’ Art Moran said, and stepped up onto the boat.

He and Abel Martinson rounded the cabin and stepped down into the cockpit. ‘You’ll want to take a peek at this,’ the sheriff said, and handed Kabuo the warrant. ‘Meanwhile we’re going to start looking around. We don’t find anything, you’re on your way.’

‘Then I’m on my way,’ Kabuo answered. ‘Because there isn’t anything to find.’

‘Good,’ answered Art. ‘Now cut your engine.’

The three of them went into the cabin. Kabuo hit the kill switch beside the wheel. It was quiet now without the engine running. ‘Have at it,’ Kabuo said.

‘Why don’t you just take a load off?’ replied Art. ‘Have a seat on your bunk.’

Kabuo sat. He read the search warrant. He watched while the deputy, Abel Martinson, went through the tools in his toolbox. Abel picked up each wrench and examined it in the beam of his flashlight. He ran his beam along the galley floor, then knelt with a flathead screwdriver in his hand and pried ajar the battery well cover. His flashlight beam ran over the batteries and down into the recesses of the well. ‘D–6s,’ he said.

When Kabuo did not reply to this, Abel slid the cover back into place and put the screwdriver away. He turned his flashlight off.

‘Engine under the bunk?’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Kabuo answered.

‘Stand up and haul the mattress,’ said Abel. ‘I’ll have a look, if you don’t mind.’

Kabuo stood, rolled the bedding aside, and opened the engine compartment hatch. ‘There you go,’ he said.

Abel flicked his flashlight on again and poked his head into the engine compartment. ‘Clean,’ he said after a while. ‘Go ahead and put your mattress back.’

They went out onto the aft deck, Abel Martinson leading. The sheriff was laying hands on things – rain gear, rubber gloves, floats, lines, hose, life ring, deck broom, buckets. He moved slowly, pondering each. He circumnavigated the boat carefully,
checking the mooring lines on each cleat as he went, kneeling to look at them closely. For a moment he went forward and knelt beside the anchor, brooding in silence over something. Then he made his way back to the stern and tucked his flashlight into his pants waist.

‘I see you replaced a mooring line lately,’ he said to Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘One right there on that second cleat to port. It’s a brand-new line, isn’t it.’

‘I’ve had that one around for a while,’ Kabuo Miyamoto explained.

The sheriff stared at him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Sure you have. Help me with this hold cover, Abel.’

They slid it to one side and peered in together. The stink of salmon flew up at them. ‘Nothing,’ said Abel. ‘Now what?’

‘Jump down in there,’ urged the sheriff. ‘Poke around a little.’

The deputy lowered himself into the hold. He knelt and flicked on his flashlight. He went through the motions of looking. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I don’t see nothing.’

‘There’s nothing to see,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘You guys are wasting your time and mine. I need to get out there fishing.’

‘Come on out,’ said Art Moran.

Abel turned to starboard, his hands on the hatch combing. Kabuo watched while he peered up under the starboard gunnel at the long-handled gaff wedged against the wall. ‘Look at this,’ Abel said.

He pulled himself out of the hold and grabbed it – a stout three-and-a-half-foot gaff with a barbed steel hook on one end. He gave it to Art Moran.

‘There’s blood on it,’ he pointed out.

‘Fish blood,’ said Kabuo. ‘I gaff fish with that.’

‘What’s fish blood doing on the butt end?’ Art asked. ‘I’d expect maybe to see blood on the hook, but on the
butt
end? Where your hand goes?
Fish
blood?’

‘Sure,’ said Kabuo. ‘It gets on your hands, sheriff. Ask any of these fishermen about that.’

The sheriff took a handkerchief from the rear pocket of his trousers and held the gaff with it. ‘I’m going to take and have this tested,’ he said, and handed it to Abel Martinson. ‘The warrant allows me to do that. I wonder if I could get you to stay in tonight, stay off the water until you hear from me. I know you want to go out and fish, but I wonder if you shouldn’t stay in tonight. Go home. Wait and see. Wait there until you hear from me. Because otherwise I’m going to have to arrest you now. Hold you in connection with all this.’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ repeated Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘And I can’t afford not to fish. I can’t let the boat sit idle on a night like this and – ’

‘Then you’re under arrest,’ cut in Art Moran. ‘Because there’s no way I’m letting you go out there. In a half hour you might be in Canada.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ replied Kabuo. ‘I’d fish and then I’d come home. And by the time I did, you’d know that gaff of mine has fish blood on it, not Heine’s. I could go out and get my salmon, check with you in the morning.’

The sheriff shook his head and slipped his hands to his belt, where he hooked his thumbs over the buckle. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re under arrest. Sorry, but we’re going to have to hold you.’

The investigation, it occurred to the sheriff, had thus far taken five hours.
Sherlock Holmes
, he remembered. Horace Whaley had laughed at his queasiness about the corpse, the peeled-back head, the bone splinters in Carl’s brain. There was that diaper spread over Susan Marie’s shoulder, and her gloved index finger pointing out the church cake, that white finger inviting him to slide a mint between his lips. She’d collapsed on the stairs with her feet splayed out, the baby bottle beside her toes. All right, in the end he had played Sherlock Holmes, yes: it had been a sort of game. He had not really expected to find anything other than that Carl Heine had drowned. Fallen into the sea like other men before him and died because that was the nature of things. Art Moran was a believer in circumstances. To him the occasional
misfortunes of life were simply part of things. The misfortunes he’d seen in the course of his work remained painful and vivid in his memory, and because he had seen them for so many years he knew that more would come his way; that was how things went. Island life was like life anywhere in this regard: bad things now and then happened.

Now he began to believe, for the first time, that he had a murder on his hands. He should have expected that sooner or later the course of things would bring him to this pass. He was satisfied to have conducted himself, in the face of it, professionally; he had pursued his investigation as well as anyone could have. Horace Whaley would not ridicule him now about playing Sherlock Holmes.

It occurred to him, too, that for all his arrogance Horace Whaley had been right. For here was the Jap with the bloody gun butt Horace had suggested he look for. Here was the Jap he’d been led to inexorably by every islander he’d spoken with.

Art Moran looked into the Jap’s still eyes to see if he could discern the truth there. But they were hard eyes set in a proud, still face, and there was nothing to be read in them either way. They were the eyes of a man with concealed emotions, the eyes of a man hiding something. ‘You’re under arrest,’ repeated Art Moran, ‘in connection with the death of Carl Heine.’

By eight-thirty on the morning of December 7, Judge Fielding’s courtroom was filled with citizens who were thankful for the heat from the boilers. They’d left damp overcoats hanging in the cloakroom but still carried the smell of snow in their hair and on their pants, boots, and sweaters. Ed Soames had again turned the heat up; he did so because the foreman of the jury had reported that certain of the jurors had passed a cold night in the Amity Harbor Hotel. Groans from the hapless radiators, coupled with the slamming of the wind against their windows, had kept them awake through the dark hours. They had been sequestered on the second floor and had speculated before going to bed, said the foreman, that the snowstorm would interrupt the trial. They’d been sleepless, most of them, and had shivered in their beds while the storm rattled the hotel.