I went up the ramp again and turned left along the walkway until I reached Marina One. At the bottom of the ramp, I could see the chain-link fence and locked gate. I loitered on the walk, keeping an eye on passersby. Finally, a middle-aged man approached, his card key in one hand, a bag of groceries in the other. He was trim and muscular, tanned to the color of rawhide. He wore Bermuda shorts, Topsiders, and a loose cotton sweater, a mat of graying chest hairs visible in the V.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you live down there?”
He paused, looking at me with curiosity. “Yes.” His face was as lined as a crumpled brown grocery bag pressed into service again.
“Do you mind if I follow you out onto Marina One? I’m trying to get a line on the man who washed up on the beach Saturday.”
“Sure, come on. I heard about that. The skiff he stole belongs to a friend of mine. By the way, I’m Aaron. You are?”
“Kinsey Millhone,” I said, trotting down the ramp after him. “How long have you lived down here?”
“Six months. My wife and I split up and she kept the house. Nice change, boat life. Lot of nice people. You a cop?”
“Private investigator,” I said. “What sort of work do you do?”
“Real estate,” he said. “How’d you get into it?” He inserted his card and pushed the gate open. He held it while I passed through. I paused on the other side so he could lead the way.
“I was hired by the dead man’s daughter,” I said.
“I meant how’d you get into investigative work.”
“Oh. I used to be a cop, but I didn’t like it much. The law enforcement part of it was fine, but not the bureaucracy. Now I’m self-employed. I’m happier that way.”
We passed a cloud of sea gulls converging rapidly on an object bobbing in the water. The screeches from the birds were attracting gulls from a quarter of a mile away, streaking through the air like missiles.
“Avocado,” Aaron said idly. “The gulls love them. This is me.” He had paused near a thirty-seven-foot twin-diesel trawler, a Chris-Craft, with a flying bridge.
“God, it’s a beautiful boat.”
“You like it? I can sleep eight,” he said, pleased. He hopped down into the cockpit and turned, holding a hand out to me. “Pop your boots off and you can come on board and take a look around. Want a drink?”
“I better not, thanks. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover yet. Is there any way you can introduce me to the guy whose skiff was stolen?”
Aaron shrugged. “Can’t help you there. He’s out on a fishing boat all day, but I can give him your name and telephone number if you like. I think the police impounded the skiff, so if you want to see that, you better talk to them.”
I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but I thought I’d leave the door open just in case. I took out a business card, jotting down my home number on the back before I passed it on to him. “Have him give me a call if he knows anything,” I said.
“I’ll tell you who you might want to talk to. Go down here six slips and see if that guy’s in. The Seascape is the name of the boat. His is Phillip Rosen. He knows all the gossip down here. Maybe he can help.”
“Thanks.”
The Seascape was a twenty-four-foot Flicka, a gaff-rigged sloop with a twenty-foot mast, teak deck, and a fiberglass hull that mimicked wood.
I tapped on the cabin roof, calling a hello toward the open doorway. Phillip Rosen appeared, ducking his head as he came up from down below. His emerging was like a visual joke: he was one of the tallest men I’d seen except on a basketball court. He was probably six-foot-ten and built on a grand scale-big hands and feet, big head with a full head of red hair, a big face with red beard and moustache, bare-chested and barefoot. Except for the ragged blue jean cutoffs, he looked like a Viking reincarnated cruelly into a vessel unworthy of him. I introduced myself, mentioning that Aaron had suggested that I talk to him. I told him briefly what I wanted.
“Well, I didn’t see them, but a friend of mine did. She was coming down here to meet me and passed ‘em in the parking lot. Man and a woman. She said the old guy was drunk as a skunk, staggering all over the place. The little gal with him had a hell of a time trying to keep him upright.”
“Do you have any idea what she looked like?” “Nope. Dinah never said. I can give you her number though, if you want to ask her about it yourself.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “What time was this?”
“I’d say two-fifteen. Dinah’s a waitress over at the Wharf and she gets off at two. I know she didn’t close up that night and it only takes five minutes to get here. Shoot, if she walked on water, she could skip across the harbor in the time it takes her to get to the parking lot.”
“Is she at work now by any chance?”
“Monday afternoon? Could be. I never heard what her schedule was this week, but you can always try. She’d be up in the cocktail lounge. A redhead. You can’t miss her if she’s there.”
Which turned out to be true. I drove the half mile from the marina to the wharf, leaving my car with the valet who handles restaurant parking. Then I went up the outside staircase to the wooden deck above. Dinah was crossing from the bar to a table in the corner, balancing a tray of margaritas. Her hair was more orange than red, too carroty a shade to be anything but natural. She was probably six feet tall in heels, wearing dark mesh hose, and a navy blue “sailor” suit with a skirt that skimmed her crotch. She had a little sailor cap pinned to her head and an air about her that suggested she’d known starboard from port since the day she reached puberty.
I waited until she’d served the drinks and was on her way back to the bar. “Dinah?”
She looked at me quizzically. Up close, I could see the overlay of pale red freckles on her face and a long, narrow nose. She wore false eyelashes, like a series of commas encircling her pale hazel eyes, lending her a look of startlement. I gave her a brief rundown, patiently repeating myself. “I know who the old guy is,” I said. “What I’m trying to get a fix on is the woman he was with.”
Dinah shrugged. “Well, I can’t tell you much. I just saw them as I went past. I mean, the marina’s got some lights, but not that great. Plus, it was raining like a son of a bitch.”
“How old would you say she was?”
“On the young side. Twenties, maybe. Blonde. Not real big, at least compared to him.”
“Long hair? Short? Buxom? Flat-chested?”
“The build, I don’t know. She was wearing a raincoat. Some kind of coat, anyway. Hair was maybe shoulder length, not a lot of curl. Kind of bushy.”
“Pretty?”
She thought briefly. “God, all I remember thinking was there was something off, you know? For starters, he was such a mess. I could smell him ten feet away. Bourbon fumes. Phew! Actually, I kind of thought she might be a hooker on the verge of rolling him. I nearly said something to her, but then I decided it was none of my business. He was having a great old time, but you know how it is. Drunk as he was, she really could have ripped him off.”
“Yeah, well, she did. Dead is about as ripped off as you can get.”
Chapter 14
By the time I pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, it was 2:00 and the air felt dank. Or maybe it was only the shadowy image of Daggett’s companion that chilled me. I’d been half convinced there was someone with him that night and now I had confirmation-not proof of murder, surely, but some sense of the events leading up to his death, a tantalizing glimpse of his consort, that “other” whose ghostly passage I tracked.
From Dinah’s description, Lovella Daggett was the first name that popped into my head. Her trashy blonde looks had made me think she was hooking when I met her in L.A. On the other hand, most of the women I’d run across to date were on the young side and fair-haired-Barbara Daggett, Billy Polo’s sister Coral, Ramona Westfall, even Marilyn Smith, the mother of the other dead child. I’d have to start pinning people down as to their whereabouts the night of the murder, a tricky matter as I had no way to coerce a reply. Cops have some leverage. A P.I. has none.