“I’m doing a story about Jimmy. You said we could chat.”
“Doubtful,” he mumbles. “How the hell’d you find me?”
“Off the police report in Nassau. It listed this marina as your home address.”
“Not for long,” says Burns.
“It’s a helluva nice boat,” I say.
“Make an offer, sport. Cleo’s selling.”
“May I come in?”
“Whatever,” he says indolently. Burns is so loaded that our brief chitchat has tired him out.
The cabin is a mess but at least it’s air-conditioned. Using an empty Dewar’s bottle as a probe, I clear a place for myself among the porn magazines and pizza boxes. Jay Burns sprawls on the floor with sunburned legs extended and his back propped against the door of the refrigerator. He relights a joint, and I’m not at all offended when he doesn’t offer me a hit.
Breaking the ice in my usual smooth way, I say: “Hey, I was listening to Stomatose on the way over. You played on a few of those cuts, right?”
Burns responds with a constipated sigh: “Jimmy asked me to.”
“The notes said you co-wrote ‘All Humped Out.’ ”
“That’s right,” he says with a sneer, “and I’m saving up the royalties to buy me a Mountain Dew.”
I abandon bogus flattery as a strategy. “How old is the boat?”
“Four years. Five, I dunno.” Jay Burns is barely glancing my way. The cabin air is severe with pepperoni and reefer.
“Cleo said you brought it across from the Bahamas by yourself.”
“No biggie,” he says.
“Where’d you learn to run blue water?”
“Hatteras. Where I grew up.”
“Ever been through anything like this before?” I ask.
“Anything like what?”
“You know. The diving accident, losing your best friend—”
Trailing blue smoke, Burns levers to his feet and lurches toward the head. “I gotta take a crap,” he says, shedding a sandal en route.
I use the interlude to pluck from the galley stovetop the latest issues of Spin and Rolling Stone, both of which are open to obituaries of Jimmy Stoma. The articles are kindly written and differ little in the details of the drowning. Even Cleo Rio’s words are practically the same. “Jimmy died doing what he loved best,” she is quoted as saying in Spin. And in Rolling Stone: “Jimmy died doing what made him happiest.”
Interestingly, there’s no mention of her “wicked bad vibe” in advance of her husband’s fatal dive. Perhaps because I’d braced her at the funeral, the widow Stomarti has omitted the tale of the tainted fish chowder. She has not, however, failed to plug her upcoming Shipwrecked Heart in both articles. I would have been flabbergasted if she hadn’t. I also expected at least one of the magazines to get wind of Jimmy Stoma’s unfinished solo project, yet there’s not a word about this—maybe Cleo told them it wasn’t true.
When Jay Burns finally emerges, unzipped and shoeless, I ask about Cleo’s premonition on the day Jimmy Stoma died. Burns squints blearily. “You lost me on that one, sport.”
“She told the New York Times she’d begged him not to make the dive. Said he’d gotten food poisoning and was in so much pain he could hardly put his tank on.”
As stoned as he is, Burns still senses quicksand. “Cleo would know,” he mumbles, “if anybody.”
“Jimmy didn’t say anything to you before he went in the water?”
“He wasn’t no complainer. He coulda had a broken neck for all I know and he wouldn’t of said word uno. That was Jimmy.”
Burns is growing jittery. He spits his doobie and gropes over my head for a pack of Marlboros, stashed beside the CD player. He sucks down half a cigarette before speaking again.
“I’m fuckin’ bushed, man.”
“Got anything to drink?” I ask.
Burns stares heavily at me.
“Relax, Jay. I’ll get it myself.” I squeeze past him toward the refrigerator. The cabin is cramped and rank. A cold beer takes the sour burn out of my throat.
Burns says, “These questions, like I tole you, Cleo would be the one to say. She could help you.”
“That wreck you guys were diving on—what kind of plane was it? Cleo wasn’t sure.”