The Narrows (2 page)

4

M
Y FIRST INTERVIEW was on the docks at the Cabrillo Marina in San Pedro. I always liked coming down this way but rarely did. I didn’t know why. It was one of those things you forget about until you do it again and then you remember that you like it. The first time I arrived I was a sixteen-year-old runaway. I made my way down to the Pedro docks and spent my days getting tattooed and watching the tuna boats come in. I spent my nights sleeping in an unlocked towboat called
Rosebud
. Until a harbormaster caught me and I was sent back to the foster home, the words
Hold Fast
tattooed across my knuckles.

Cabrillo Marina was newer than that memory. These weren’t the working docks where I had ended up so many years before. Cabrillo Marina provided dockage for pleasure craft. The masts of a hundred sailboats poked up behind its locked gates like a forest after a wildfire. Beyond these were rows of power yachts, many in the millions of dollars in value.

Some not. Buddy Lockridge’s boat was not a floating castle. Lockridge, who Graciela McCaleb told me was her husband’s charter partner and closest friend at the end, lived on a thirty-two-foot sailboat that looked like it had the contents of a sixty-footer on its deck. It was a junker, not by virtue of the boat itself but by how it was cared for. If Lockridge had lived in a house it would’ve had cars on blocks in the yard and walls of stacked newspapers inside.

He had buzzed me in at the gate and emerged from the cabin wearing shorts, sandals and a T-shirt worn and washed so many times the inscription across the chest was unreadable. Graciela had called him ahead of time. He knew I wanted to talk to him but not the exact reason why.

“So,” he said as he stepped off the boat onto the dock. “Graciela said you are looking into Terry’s death. Is this like an insurance thing or something?”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“You like a private eye or something?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

He asked for identification and I showed him the laminated wallet copy of my license that had been sent to me from Sacramento. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at my formal first name.

“Hieronymus Bosch. Like that crazy painter, huh?”

It was rare that someone recognized the name. That told me something about Buddy Lockridge.

“Some say he was crazy. Some think he accurately foretold the future.”

The license seemed to appease him and he said we could talk in his boat or we could walk over to the chandlery to get a cup of coffee. I wanted to get a look inside his home and boat—it was basic investigative strategy—but didn’t want to be obvious about it so I told him I could use some caffeine.

The chandlery was a ship’s store that was a five-minute walk down the dock. We small-talked as we walked over and I mostly listened to Buddy complain about his portrayal in the movie that had been inspired by McCaleb’s heart transplant and his search for his donor’s killer.

“They paid you, didn’t they?” I asked when he was finished.

“Yes, but that’s not the point.”

“Yes it is. Put your money in the bank and forget about the rest. It’s just a movie.”

There were some tables and benches outside the chandlery and we took our coffees there. Lockridge started asking questions before I got the chance. I let him run his line out a little bit. My view was that he was a very important piece of my investigation, since he knew Terry McCaleb and was one of two witnesses to his death. I wanted him to feel comfortable with me so I let him ask away.

“So what’s your pedigree?” he asked. “Were you a cop?”

“Almost thirty years. With the LAPD. Half of the time I worked homicides.”

“Murders, huh? Did you know Terror?”

“What?”

“I mean, Terry. I called him Terror.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I just did. I give everyone nicknames. Terry had seen firsthand the terror of the world, you know what I mean? I called him Terror.”

“What about me? What’s my nickname going to be?”

“You . . .”

He looked at me like a sculptor sizing up a block of granite.

“Um, you are Suitcase Harry.”

“How come?”

“Because you’re sort of rumpled, like you live out of a suitcase.”

I nodded.

“Pretty good.”

“So, did you know Terry?”

“Yes, I knew him. We worked a few cases together when he was with the bureau. Then one more after he got the new heart.”

He snapped his fingers and pointed at me.

“Now I remember, you were the cop. You were the one who was here that night on his boat when those two goons showed up to do him in. You saved him and then he turned around and saved you.”

I nodded.

“That’s right. Now can I ask some questions, Buddy?”

He spread his hands wide, indicating he was available and had nothing to hide.

“Oh, sure, man, I didn’t mean to be hogging the microphone, you know?”

I took out my notebook and put it on the table.

“Thanks. Let’s start with that last charter. Tell me about it.”

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

Lockridge expelled his breath.

“That’s a tall order,” he said.

But he began to tell me the story. What he initially told me matched the minimal accounts I had read in the Las Vegas papers and what I had then heard when I attended McCaleb’s funeral. McCaleb and Lockridge had been on a four-day, three-night charter, taking a party of one into waters off Baja California to fish for marlin. While returning to Avalon Harbor on Catalina on the fourth day McCaleb collapsed at the boat’s topside helm station. They were 22 miles off the coast, midway between San Diego and Los Angeles. A help call was radioed to the U.S. Coast Guard and a rescue chopper was dispatched. McCaleb was airlifted to a hospital in Long Beach, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

When he was finished telling it I nodded like it had matched everything I had already heard.

“Did you actually see him collapse?”

“No, not really. I felt it, though.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he was up on top at the wheel. I was in the pit with the charter party. We were headed north, going home. The party’d had enough fishing by then so we weren’t even trolling. Terry had it flat out, probably doing twenty-five knots. So me and Otto—he’s the party—we were in the cockpit and the boat suddenly made a ninety-degree turn to the west. Out to sea, man. I knew that wasn’t in the plan so I climbed up the ladder to poke my head up there and I see Terry sort of hunched over the wheel. He’d collapsed. I got to him and he was alive but, man, he was out of it.”

“What did you do?”

“I was a lifeguard once. Venice Beach. I still know my CPR. I called Otto up on top and I went to work on Terry while Otto got control of the boat and got on the radio to call the Coast Guard. I was never able to bring Terry around but I kept putting air into him until that helicopter showed up. Took them long enough, too.”

I wrote a note in my notebook. Not because it was important but because I wanted Lockridge to know I took him seriously and that whatever he thought was important was also important to me.

“How long did they take?”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes. I’m not sure how long but it seemed like an eternity when you’re trying to keep somebody breathing.”

“Yeah. Everybody I talked to said you did your best. So you’re saying he never said a word. He just collapsed at the wheel.”

“Exactly.”

“Then what was the last thing he said to you?”

Lockridge started chewing the nail on one of his thumbs as he tried to recall this.

“That’s a good question. I guess it was when he came back to the railing that looks down into the cockpit and he yelled down that we’d be home by sunset.”

“And how long was this before he collapsed?”

“Maybe a half hour, maybe a little longer.”

“He seemed fine then?”

“Yeah, he seemed like the regular Terror, you know? Nobody could’ve guessed what was going to happen.”

“By now you men had been on the boat for four straight days, right?”

“That’s right. Pretty close quarters because the party got the stateroom. Me and Terry bunked it in the forward cabin.”

“During that time did you see Terry take his meds every day? You know, all the pills he had to take.”

Lockridge nodded emphatically.

“Oh, yeah, he was popping his pills right and left. Every morning and every night. We’d been out on a lot of charters together. It was his ritual—he set his watch by it. He never missed. And he didn’t on this trip either.”

I made a few more notes just to keep silent so that Lockridge might keep talking. But he didn’t.

“Did he say anything about them tasting different, or him feeling different after taking them?”

“Is that what this is about? You people are trying to say Terry took the wrong pills and then not have to pay the insurance? If I had known that, I would’ve never agreed to talk to you.”

He started to get up from his bench. I reached over and gripped his arm.

“Sit down, Buddy. That’s not what this is about. I don’t work for the insurance company.”

He dropped heavily back onto the bench and looked at his arm where I had gripped it.

“Then what is it about?”

“You already know what it’s about. I’m just making sure Terry’s death was what it was supposed to be.”

“Supposed to be?”

I realized that I had used an unfortunate choice of words.

“What I’m trying to say is that I want to make sure he didn’t have any help.”

Lockridge studied me for a long moment and slowly nodded.

“You mean like the pills were tainted or messed with?”

“Maybe.”

Lockridge set his jaw tightly with resolve. It looked genuine to me.

“You need any help?”

“I might need some, yeah. I’m going over to Catalina tomorrow morning. I’m going to look at the boat. Can you meet me there?”

“Absolutely.”

He seemed excited and I knew I would eventually drop a rock on that but for now I wanted his full cooperation.

“Good. Now let me ask a few more questions. Tell me about the charter party. Did you know this guy Otto beforehand?”

“Oh, yeah, we take Otto out a couple times a year. He lives over there on the island, that’s the only reason why we got the multiday charter. See, that was the problem with the business but Terror never cared. He just was happy to sit there in that little harbor and wait on half days.”

“Slow down a second, Buddy. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Terry keeping the boat over there on that island. What we got over there were people who are visiting Catalina and want to go fishing for a few hours. We didn’t get the big charters. The three-, four-, five-day jobs where you make the good money. Otto was the exception because he lives over there and he wanted to go fishing off Mexico a couple times a year and get his ashes hauled in the process.”

Lockridge was giving me more information and avenues of questioning than I could handle at once. I stayed on McCaleb but would definitely come back to Otto, their charter client.

“You’re saying that Terry was content to sort of be small-time.”

“Exactly. I kept telling him, ‘Move the charter over here to the mainland, put out some ads and get some serious work.’ But he didn’t want to.”

“Did you ever ask him why?”

“Sure, he wanted to stay on the island. He didn’t want to be away from the family all the time. And he wanted time to work on his files.”

“You mean his old cases?”

“Yeah, that and some new ones.”

“What new ones?”

“I don’t know. He was always clipping articles out of the newspaper and sticking them in files, making phone calls, things like that.”

“On the boat?”

“Yeah, on the boat. Graciela wouldn’t allow it in the house. He told me that, that she didn’t like him doing it. Sometimes it got to the point he was sleeping on the boat at night. At the end. I think it was because of the files. He’d get obsessed with something and she’d end up telling him to stay on the boat until he got over it.”

“He told you that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

“Any case or file you remember he was interested in lately?”

“No, he no longer included me in that stuff. I helped him work on his heart case and then he sort of shut me out of that stuff.”

“Did that bother you?”

“Not really. I mean, I was willing to help. Chasing bad guys is more interesting than chasing fish, but I knew that was his world and not mine.”

It sounded too much like a stock answer, like he was repeating an explanation McCaleb had once given to him. I decided to leave it at that but I knew this was a subject I would come back to with him.

“Okay, let’s go back to Otto. You fished with him how many times?”

“This was our third—no, fourth—trip.”

“Always down to Mexico?”

“Pretty much.”

“What does he do for a living that he can afford to do this?”

“He’s retired. Thinks he’s Zane Grey and wants to go sportfishing, catch a black marlin and put it up on his wall. He can afford it. He told me he was a salesman, but I never asked what he sold.”

“Retired? How old is he?”

“I don’t know, midsixties.”

“Retired from where?”

“Just across the water. Long Beach, I think.”

“What did you mean a minute ago when you said he liked to go fishing and get his ashes hauled?”

“I meant exactly that. We took him fishing and when we’d stop off in Cabo, he always had something on the side.”

“So each night on this last trip, you guys brought the boat into port, always to Cabo.”

“The first two nights in Cabo and then the third night we made it to San Diego.”

“Who chose those places?”

“Well, Otto wanted to go to Cabo, and San Diego was just the halfway point on the trip back. We always take it slow going back.”

“What happened in Cabo with Otto?”

“I told you, he had a little something on the side down there. Both nights he got cleaned up and went into town. I think he was meeting a senorita there. He had made some calls on his cell phone.”