Floaters Page 8

  Leeds was speechless, staring at his naked left ring finger.

  Fortney said, “If that babe isn’t a cop, she oughtta be. I’d ask her to become my third wife instantly. No prenuptials. Nothing. I’d give that girl my Jet Ski!”

  —

  The vice cops promised they wouldn’t arrest Oliver Mantleberry until Dawn had time to settle her affairs and go. There was no question of her staying in San Diego, not after Oliver found out she’d agreed to work with the cops and had made a transcribed phone call where Oliver had reassured her that she was his top bitch but demanded to know why she couldn’t catch as many dates as Alice, his bottom bitch. When she’d asked if she could cash her welfare check he’d said, Fuck, no. He’d cash it like he always did.

  Listening to that had made Letch Boggs break into an extra-big rat-tooth grin.

  Her baby. At least Billy was safe with her mom and sister in L.A., and the cops promised they’d keep her mom’s address a secret. That’s where she was going temporarily. Then she was going to get a job and clean herself up. She’d told that to the vice cops. They’d said sure.

  And they said when she got her own apartment she should check in with her mother twice every day in case her subpoena arrived. Dawn had asked the vice cops, What do you take me for? I’ll be going there every day to check up on the baby! The vice cops said, Sure.

  Most of Dawn’s belongings were boxed and ready to go even if she wasn’t. Her clothes—except for those she used in her business—were already at her mother’s house, where they’d remain until she found an apartment in West Hollywood. That’d be a good location for her, West Hollywood. Close to Sunset Boulevard, where she could turn a few dates until she found a straight job and cleaned herself up.

  She couldn’t just white-knuckle it, could she? She’d need to be in a neighborhood like West Hollywood where she could get speedballs. How could she turn dates without speedballs? But only until she got on her feet.

  A knock at the door. Not Oliver’s knock. He kind of scratched at the door like a dog. And he seldom stopped by, thinking it was safer to meet away from his place and hers. And he never came by this late. If it was Blaze, she’d knock four times, pause, and knock again. No, this knock sounded like somebody who expected, demanded, admittance. It was either her landlady or a cop.

  When she looked through the peephole her heart went icy. She opened the door for Letch Boggs, who leered at her with those scary rat teeth.

  God! Maybe he came expecting her to do him? A friendly little half-and-half before you go away, Dawn? For auld lang syne or something? God!

  “Hi, Mister Boggs,” she said warily. “Where’s your sidekick?”

  “Working alone tonight,” he said. “I work alone whenever it ain’t dangerous. You ain’t dangerous, are you?”

  He did want to get laid. She just knew it.

  “I’m almost ready to call a mover,” Dawn said. “Maybe in a week or ten days?”

  “Won’t need much of a truck. This all you got?”

  “My clothes’re already at my mom’s. At the address in L.A. I gave you. You probably checked it out, huh?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We don’t wanna lose you.”

  Letch Boggs was dressed pretty much like he always dressed, in one of those Hawaiian shirts—this one a bright yellow—which hung over his belly outside his pants so it would cover up the gun and handcuffs. Most of the vice cops she knew wore jeans or Dockers, but this old dork wore those wide-wale corduroy pants that her father had had on the last time she’d ever seen him, when he abandoned his wife and three kids and was never heard from again.

  “I wouldn’t try to burn you, Mister Boggs,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said, “but I couldn’t just turn you loose up there in that big bad city without knowing how to find little Billy. Love that kid. So cute, just like his mom.”

  Here it comes! Take your clothes off, Mom. And get on the bed for a quick one before the movers take it away, Mom.

  But Letch Boggs only said, “You got money?”

  “About enough for gas.”

  He handed her a fifty-dollar bill and said, “This is my personal money. Pay it back when you return for Oliver’s court date.”

  “Thanks,” she said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “While I’m here, you can do something for me.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, hoping he’d settle for a fast head job. She didn’t want this smelly old creep inside her.

  “Show me the answering machine that belongs to your pal, Blaze Duvall.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t interested in Blaze.”

  “Never know when information like that might come in handy.”

  “You said you’d settle for Oliver,” Dawn reminded him.

  “I didn’t say I was gonna try to make a case on Blaze, did I? I just wanna know who’s working and who ain’t. I just like to keep up.”

  “Well, that’s her answering machine,” Dawn said, pointing to the machine on the sink counter. “I pay both phone bills and she pays me back.”

  “How long you been knowing her?” Letch asked, walking over to the machine and pushing the message check. Blaze’s voice came on and said, “Please leave a message after the beep.” Nothing more.

  “I got busted with her back in, let’s see, about eight years ago when I first came to San Diego. I was a seventeen-year-old runaway. Blaze is five or six years older than me.”

  “Did she work the streets with you?”

  “I wasn’t on the streets then. We both worked in this massage parlor. Some old-time hooker named Serenity owned the place. She taught me how to give massages. Sort of.”

  “Serenity Jones?” Letch said. “I know her.”

  “Yeah, well, after Serenity got busted along with four of us girls, she went outta business. Like, I did outcall for a while, but then I started messing with crystal meth. Then I went to jail two more times. Then I started doing heroin. Then I went to jail for ninety days. Then I started working the streets. Then I started doing speedballs. Then I got knocked up and go, Fuck it! I’m having the baby. Then I met Oliver. And here I am.”

  “And Blaze?”

  “I don’t think she ever got busted after that first time. She’s real smart. Just stuck with outcall massage.”

  “When she was booked with you that time, what name did she use? Blaze Duvall’s gotta be a humbug name.”

  “I ain’t sure,” Dawn said. “Back then I was dumb enough to give my real name, Jane Kelly. I don’t know what name Blaze used.”

  “I’ll check your old arrest report,” Letch said.

  “I thought you said Oliver was enough for you? Why you gotta fuck-over Blaze?”

  “Just wanna know what’s what,” Letch said. “I didn’t say I was gonna fuck-over her.”

  “She’s gonna come by next week and get her machine. And I’m gonna say good-bye to her. And, like, I’d hate to think you’re gonna work a case on her. She’s been good to me.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “And, remember, I need ten days to close my business here. You can’t arrest Oliver till then! Promise?”

  “Give your papoose a kiss for Uncle Letch,” the vice cop said, walking toward the door.

  “That’s all?” Dawn Coyote said. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Letch said. “What else you expect?”

  “Nothing,” Dawn said. It was the first time she ever smiled at him. “Thanks, Mister Boggs. Thanks for not busting me and taking my baby away. And thanks for the fifty bucks.”

  When she opened the door, the garden patio down below was dark and quiet. Even though there were eighty-three units in the building there was seldom any foot traffic after ten at night. Only the walk lights were on.

  Letch stood on the second floor with his hand on the railing, facing the waiflike hooker. “I was you, Dawn,” he said, “I’d go into treatment. You need at least sixty days in a drug facility.” Then he sta
rted walking.

  “I’m gonna clean up, Mister Boggs!” Dawn Coyote called after him. “You’ll see!”

  Letch Boggs descended the stairs and walked slowly toward his vice car parked on the street. He passed an alcove by the community swimming pool. Inside the alcove was a machine that dispensed candy, pretzels, and potato chips, and beside it were machines for soda pop and ice.

  Stooped against the wall in the shadow cast by the soda machine was a tall black man. He wore a collarless long-sleeved jersey that hugged his muscular torso. His head was shaved, but he had a heavy, droopy black mustache, along with a toothbrush patch of hair under his lower lip. He stared up at Dawn Coyote’s door.

  He’d changed his mind about visiting her to see if her flu was better and she was ready to work, or if she was just shining him about the flu, the lazy bitch. Instead he walked directly to his white Jaguar parked in the alley.

  He drove out to El Cajon Boulevard and asked the first hooker he saw if she’d ever come in contact with a dumpy old white guy named Mr. Boggs. She hadn’t. He asked every girl on the boulevard the same question that night.

  CHAPTER 5

  Even with Olympic Champion Rod Davis at the helm, the Aussies so far hadn’t been able to beat Team New Zealand. The Kiwis were handling the Aussies as they’d handled everyone else, and giving bouts of anxiety to the Keeper of the Cup every night since the challenger races had begun.

  Nine days had passed since Blaze met the Kiwi crane operator and Simon Cooke, yet she’d phoned Ambrose only once to say he shouldn’t worry, that she was confident. That she shouldn’t rush things.

  She was confident? She shouldn’t rush things? Was he insane to conspire with someone like Blaze Duvall? He wondered how many years he’d have to serve if the conspiracy failed? If he was exposed!

  In his heart he knew the answer to that: None. He’d rather die than spend one day behind bars. Ambrose Lutterworth could never face exposure, let alone a prison term.

  Blaze Duvall. A face on the darkened ceiling, grinning at him in that way of hers. Undeniably bright and charming, in the way that a street person is charming. Not that he’d ever associated with someone streetwise. In his life, in his world, the most savvy people he’d ever known he’d met in an eight-month army stint during the Korean War. That was before severe asthma had resulted in a medical discharge. He hadn’t even succeeded at being a soldier. He’d overheard his mother tell his father that men with IQs of 85 could succeed at that.

  During the months when he was a patient at the army hospital, he read unstated censure in his mother’s letters, as though a respiratory disease implied a lack of patriotism. He thought he’d have been a good soldier if he’d had the chance.

  Ambrose needed reassurance from Blaze Duvall. If nothing else, he needed her hands. And at last, after nine days, she’d phoned to say she’d see him on Saturday evening, the fifteenth of April. That she’d be at his house sometime before midnight, hopefully with good news.

  When he’d asked how she felt about their chances, Blaze would only say, “I can deal with them, Ambrose. They’re men, aren’t they?”

  Easy for her to be flippant, a woman like her. How could she know, how could anyone know, what his life had been like before the Cup? He’d always suffered from insomnia, and he raked emotional trash during the hour of regret, obsessively uncovering every peccadillo, every humiliation, every failure he’d experienced in his uneventful life. A former lady friend once told Ambrose that some people were unable to dwell on past successes, only on failures. He didn’t tell her that there were so few successes.

  Then, after he’d become Keeper of the Cup, after he’d dined with kings, after he’d signed autographs for people in a dozen foreign countries, he’d lie in bed at night and go to sleep recollecting triumphs.

  So while Blaze Duvall kept him at bay, unable to fathom how anxious he was, how fearful, he strove to forgive her insensitivity. How could he expect a person like Blaze Duvall to even grasp the concept of glory?

  Ambrose got out of bed and took his second sedative. He hated to do that, but at last he fell asleep, awakening at daybreak with a pounding headache.

  —

  On Saturday morning, after returning from aerobics, Blaze found an urgent message from Dawn Coyote on her machine. The younger woman said, “It’s me. Phone right away!”

  Blaze phoned twice, but Dawn didn’t answer. She reached Dawn at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  “What is it?” Blaze asked. “Don’t tell me you got busted last night?”

  “No,” Dawn said, “but I wanted you to know I’m outta here!”

  “Outta where?”

  “Town. San Diego. I’m leaving and I ain’t coming back.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I ain’t sure yet, but I gotta get out.”

  “What happened?”

  “It ain’t happened yet, but it’s gonna happen tomorrow.”

  “What is?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Dawn!”

  “Honest, Blaze, I can’t say! It’s better for you if you don’t know! I’m scared!”

  “Of what? Did you kill somebody?”

  “No, but somebody’s gonna kill me if I ain’t outta here before Monday morning. That’s my deadline.”

  “What deadline?”

  “I can’t say. But I gotta work hard tonight and catch as many dates as I can. It’s my last night on these streets.”

  “If you can’t tell me anything, why’d you call?”

  “To say so long. And to tell you I’ll drop off your answering machine this afternoon.”

  “You know I don’t like you coming here, especially if you’re in trouble.”

  “I ain’t in trouble today,” she said. “I’m gonna be in big trouble Monday if I’m still in town.”

  “I love a mystery.” Blaze sighed. “Come by at five o’clock, but no later. I’ve got a big evening planned with a crew of sailors.”

  “You’re doing sailors, Blaze?” Dawn exclaimed. “I can’t believe it! Where do ya catch ’em? Down by the Thirty-second Street navy yard?”

  —

  A cormorant veered, a gull plunged, a pelican soared. Seabirds were gloriously happy on this cool and blustery April morning. Fortney was sitting on the boat seat, enjoying the show, with his hands in the pockets of his blue flotation jacket. Suddenly a shaft of sunlight flashed on a leaping fish. Stormlight on the water seemed to fill sea creatures with inexpressible joy. Fortney felt it; Leeds only felt cold.

  Leeds, who always wanted to show off his muscular calves, was in shorts. He also wore his jacket, but he was shivering. “Sometimes I miss the good old days when I had Saturdays off,” he said as he steered the Boston Whaler out onto Sail Bay.

  “You can cure that by walking into the boss’s office and saying you wanna go back to four-wheel patrol,” Fortney reminded him. “Then you can get weekends off.”

  “You might get stuck with partners you don’t like even more than you don’t like me,” Leeds said. “You ever liked anybody? Your ex-wives, for instance? Or your ex-cat?”

  “I liked my ex-parakeet,” Fortney said. “But he got eaten by my ex-cat, who my ex-wife accidentally ran over with my ex-car after her lawyer put me into poverty. Nowadays, people learn the word sue right after momma. And sue ain’t a girl’s name. For things that used to get you called moron, they now get you a lawyer’s business card. You’re not a moron, you’re a plaintiff.”

  “No wonder you’re so cranky and bitter,” Leeds said. “You’re lawyer-whipped.”

  “So when’re you going?” Fortney wanted to know.

  “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Then why’re you bitching about working Saturdays?”

  “Sometimes I like to hear a voice. You ever notice you don’t open your mouth till you have your third cup of coffee? I might as well bring a karaoke machine to work. I could get more conversation outta Marcel Marceau.”

  Fortney said noth
ing.

  Leeds nodded at him. “My point exactly.”

  Fortney thought maybe he could bear idle conversation after his second cup of coffee. There was no point in responding to Leeds’s bitching. He knew that his young partner enjoyed the benefits of “yachting,” which is what dry-land cops called the Harbor Unit’s water patrol. Leeds just liked to babble and bitch, but after twenty years of police work older cops tended to talk less, and Fortney was no exception.

  On Sail Bay slanting light beaming through the low clouds had turned the bay into a glitter of silver spangles. Fortney started to call his partner’s attention to it but gave up the idea when Leeds said, “It’s dead out here. Let’s go down to Coronado. See if that babe’s still working lunch. What’s her name, Lois Lane?”

  “That’s Superman’s squeeze. This one’s Linda Lantz.”

  “Yeah, that one. Wanna go see her?”

  “Remember last time we went there for our afternoon tea and cookies?”

  “Yeah,” Leeds said. “I remember.”

  One winter afternoon they’d decided to take a cruise down to San Diego harbor. The ocean was glassy when they’d left Mission Bay, but it had soon turned choppy. Leeds had spun his blue cap around backward and opened her up, getting them out past the kelp beds in minutes. The vast meadows of kelp discouraged frequent runs back and forth between Mission Bay and San Diego harbor, but when the tide was high, small boats could cut their travel time by motoring between the shoreline and the kelp. On that day they’d had to circle it, cruising out on the ocean.

  Cloud shadow and whitecaps. Shafts of light set the whitecaps aflame. Fortney watched low, swirling puffs of cloud tear apart and re-form in a thousand wispy shapes. He would never voluntarily return to the streets.

  As they entered San Diego harbor a nuclear sub was cruising out from the sub base. A young officer on the conning tower gave the police boat a salute as they passed. Leeds, who’d never been in military service, returned it with a sharp, Bill Clinton–like gesture. Fortney just waved at the sub with his fingers.

  One of the home-port aircraft carriers was docked at the North Island Naval Air Station quay that afternoon. Fortney wanted to cruise close to see if it was the Constellation or the Kitty Hawk, but Leeds said he needed to deliver his hungry body to a ham sandwich, coffee, and the size-forty bustline belonging to Linda Lantz, the smart-mouthed waitress who worked in an eatery by the ferry dock.