Cocaine and Blue Eyes Read online

  "Were they rivals when they were younger?"

  "Not in the usual sense. Catherine always wanted to live on a pedestal. The opera, museums, that part of Society. And Dani, well, Dani has her friends, and they're more important than any museum. In a way, she's always been the more social one. She likes to get out and meet people."

  The second floor was storage space. Derelict file cabinets and outdated files and cannibalized truck engines. Spare fishing nets and surplus camping gear. Our voices had echoes among the dust.

  A window looked down at the China Creek piers. Several trawlers were berthed alongside the brick building. A rusted black freighter under the Panamanian flag was being unloaded by longshoremen on the other bank. The Bayshore Freeway and the low rent tenements of Portolla Hill were background.

  The mist was back, and I cursed it. I've always hated the rainy season. These coastal storms had no squalls, no noise, no lightning. They were long and monotonous. They came and sat on the city like paid weepers.

  "Could she have gotten a place by herself?"

  "She could've. She's done it before."

  "When was this?"

  "Four years ago, maybe five. She went up to Seattle. Just dropped out of college and went north. Didn't tell a soul, either."

  "How'd you hear about it?"

  "A postcard. 'Don't worry. I'm okay. See you around sometime.'"

  "How did the family react to it?"

  "Those assholes," he said. "They stuck their heads in the sand and acted like nothing happened. If you want something done, you have to do it yourself."

  "What did you do?"

  "I got on the phone, started calling everybody I knew up there. Friends, business associates, anyone. This buddy of mine, a salmon packer up there, he calls me back and tells me she's working as a filleter in his cannery."

  "And you caught the next plane north."

  "She looked like a scarecrow." The memory still horrified him. "Scabs on her legs, scabies in her hair, her face all broken up, she had lost all kinds of weight."

  She sounded more like a junkie than a scarecrow, but I waited for him to go on. I hadn't seen her for myself.

  "She was pissed. She wouldn't even talk to me. Like I was pulling a dirty trick on her. Like I busted in on her. Busted in, hell, I'm her cousin. I did it for her, not for me."

  "That's what cousins are for," I said. "Yeah, that's what we're here for."

  "Did she come back with you?"

  "She said she was staying."

  "How long was she in Seattle?"

  "Six, seven months. Then she came back like she had never left. But now she's got this boyfriend in tow."

  Everybody kept using the same phrase. When Dani brought him home with her. It sounded like a pet following a kid home, and now her parents let the kid keep the dumb animal. Well, he was a runt. Maybe the runt of the litter.

  "What did you think of Joey?" I asked.

  "You shouldn't say things about the dead, but since I said them to his face, I guess I can tell you. I hated the little shit. He wouldn't shake hands with me."

  "How come?"

  "Because I run a fish company. Shit, there's nothing wrong with fish. People like it, and it's good for them. And that little shit had been working alongside Dani in Seattle, gutting fish the same way this family's been doing for generations."

  I had to admit it made no sense. "What about the rest of the family? How did they feel about him?"

  "Nobody could stand him. Nobody except my wife. She got the biggest laugh outta him. Dani the snob hanging out with a punk like him. She and Dani never hit it off."

  "What about Catherine?"

  "Oh, God, the way she treated him. She'd ignore him until he got nervous. As soon as he started to fidget, she'd level her eyes at him in that high society manner of hers, until he stopped. Then she'd ignore him until he got nervous again. Then she'd start all over again. God, it was cruel. But that's Catherine. She can be such a cruel-hearted bitch."

  "Would Dani go back to Seattle?"

  "She might go anywhere. Lake Tahoe, maybe. The family owns some property up there. She'd be close to grandfather, too."

  "When was the last time you talked with him?"

  "Just after we got back from Hawaii. A couple of days before Christmas. We were coming in the door when he called. But he would've told us if she was there."

  "He's the founder, right?"

  "His grandfather was. My great-great-grandfather. But it's really his company more than anybody else's. He ran it the longest and built it up to where it is now. You know, he kept it going for forty years, just by himself."

  "He's retired, I suppose."

  "Sort of. He keeps his fingers in the business, but that's mostly to keep him busy, stave off death, so we humor him. He had a heart attack several years ago, so he sold off a lot of his holdings, set up the trust funds and moved up to Stateline."

  "Trust funds? For his grandchildren?"

  Riki had another hearty smile. "After the heart attack, he discovered he couldn't take it with him, and the state would grab most of it, so he decided to settle accounts before he croaked."

  "So who owns the fish company?"

  "Well, we all do. All the cousins, in one way or another. He divided the shares into thirds. He sold one third outright, kept a third for himself and gave us, his grandchildren, the last third in the form of trust funds. Plus, of course, the money he made from selling the first third."

  "So you wouldn't have to spend the rest of your life scaling fish."

  "Yes, well, that's right, I guess."

  "How's Dani set for money?"

  "That's hard to say. She's got some, probably not that much. A hundred grand, maybe a little more."

  "You don't think that's a lot?"

  "That's not much divided over the last ten years. She owns that houseboat, for one thing. A hundred grand doesn't do much nowadays. In fact, she tried borrowing from me recently. Some kind of investment, I guess. I didn't ask her about it, because I didn't have any to spare myself."

  "When was this?"

  "November. Sometime around then."

  "Well, at least she doesn't have to work for a living."

  "Oh, she had a job. She sang in a band for almost a year. More heart than talent, but she got paid for it."

  "Where did she sing? Any special place?"

  "She sang in a lot of places. But there was one joint she worked maybe two, three times each week. It was down near the airport. One of those cocktail lounges. Arroyo Grande. That's it."

  "Does the band still play together?"

  "They broke up. October? No, it was November."

  "The guys in the band? Did any have names?"

  "Oh, I never met them."

  "Is there anybody else who might... ?"

  "My kid brother. He might know."

  "How can I meet him?"

  "He works down in the smokehouse." Riki looked at me. "You've heard of smoked salmon, haven't you?"

  Chapter 7

  Workmen in red rubber aprons and black rubber boots. Filleters and slicers and gutters. Concrete floors and fish heads. Dirty windows and cakes of ice and puddles of water. Weight scales and fish scales. Long aluminum tables with running water and hosing troughs. Mounds of salt everywhere. Staple guns and cardboard boxes.

  "We're the biggest in the Bay Area," Riki told me. "We supply most hotels, most restaurants, even the supply centers for the Armed Forces."

  Fish defrosting in daylight. Malaysian shrimp and shark fin. Dover sole and rex sole. Flounder and abalone and salmon. Kippered herring and Alaskan lobster and rock cod and perch. Butter fish and ling cod and prawns. Kingfish and oysters and steelhead trout. Dungeness crab and malefic squid and mackerel and clams and scallops. Smoked salmon and salmon caviar.

  "You can't catch all this by yourself," I said.

  "Oh no." He had a hearty laugh. "We have a fair-sized fleet here, and most of the fleet's up north in Coos Bay and Vancouver, but we could never ge
t all this from the sea, not even with a thousand boats."

  He ran it down for me. Each company sent out its own fleet, and each fleet caught what the sea gave up. What a company couldn't catch, it bought from its competitors, who were in the same boat.

  The Anatoles caught salmon off the Oregon coast, but bought Peruvian tuna for its Portland customers. The tuna fleet based in San Pedro bought Alaskan king crab for its Southern California customers. The Florida shrimpers sell to the Japanese who have shark fin, but need smoked salmon.

  "There's competition, of course," he went on, "but a lot less than most industries. We have to cooperate or we lose our customers." He stopped in midstep. "Shit. I almost forgot."

  A Chicano workman had caught his eye. The man was filling plastic bags with what looked like and rattled like slate shingles. The slate shingles were frozen fish fillets. When Riki hailed him, the man left his plastic bags. Peeling off his heavy gloves, the man left a trail of frost behind him.

  "There's a case of Johnny Walker upstairs," Riki told him. "Dump it for me in my trunk, okay? Oh, and after that, five pounds of rex sole in freezer paper."

  The smokehouse was dark and dry, a desert cave. We had to duck our heads to enter. Salt made a crunching sound beneath our shoes. There were long tables and giant fans, galvanized ovens and buckets of salt. The slabs of smoked salmon sat in their trays like red hot coals on a rack.

  There was a large fish on a metal table. It was pink and grey and over four feet long. The eyes were shiny and lifeless, and the jaws gaped like a cry that's gone unanswered. There were rings of fresh blood around the jaws. I asked and learned it was a sturgeon.

  "You awake, Jack?"

  "Why should I be asleep?" Jack Anatole was a good-looking man and could be a knock-out in some crowds. Prominent cheekbones and a square jaw line and white teeth. The Anatole eyes, pale blue and piercing, were almost hidden behind shaggy dark eyebrows.

  "Brennen, this is my brother Jack."

  "Pleased to meet you."

  Jack was almost a decade younger than Riki Anatole, nearly my age in fact. He weighed as much as his brother, but he was the real athlete. He was huskier and taller, muscular as a swimmer with strong forearms and a thick neck. His legs were solid and his shoulders were broad. He looked like he could move quickly.

  "Did I tell you Jack's a war hero?"

  "I was no hero, Riki." Jack was patient, almost brotherly. "I was either sitting on my ass or making one outta myself. Nothing to be proud of, either way."

  Riki objected. "He won a Bronze Star in Vietnam."

  "I also spent time in the stockade," Jack told me. "He never talks about that. He's not interested in any time! might've pulled. Just the medals."

  Riki was embarrassed. "You were cleared." His twitch was back again.

  "The charges were dropped."

  "Because you were innocent," Riki insisted. He was beginning to realize he couldn't salvage this situation. "It was an accident. It was years ago."

  "I got a record." Jack's anger was sudden. "It's on my discharge."

  I pulled up a stool and asked what happened.

  "I was a gunner on a chopper," he said. "A guy fell out of it. A South Vietnamese colonel. They said I pushed him, but they couldn't get anybody to testify against me."

  "You should forget it," Riki said. "It was just bad luck."

  Jack said nothing. There was the hint of a smile on his face. His smile was bittersweet and sad around the edges, as if too many dreams had soured for him. I've seen that smile before on others my age. It comes from sitting in limbo. They feel obsolete before they get started. They're not waiting for their ship to come in. They'd settle for the tide.

  The Chinese bookkeeper came in with a problem he couldn't solve and Riki went off into a huddle with him. While Riki scanned the ledger pages, looking for a solution, Jack watched his brother. There was little love in his eyes. Only a lingering sorrow. Theirs was an old argument, and one they would never resolve.

  The bookkeeper was huge. I couldn't get over his size. He was fifty pounds and a half-foot taller than me. Chitown keeps growing them bigger and bigger, as big as any race can be. If his ponytail had been a pigtail, the bookkeeper could have stepped from the old Tong alleys of San Francisco. With a hatchet, he'd be the stuff nightmares are made of. His eyes were rocks, hard and unswerving, black as night. But he only had eyes for Jack.

  I'd seen sharp eyes like his before. Young male hookers plodding the midnight pavement around the Union Square hotels, rubbing their eyes to keep away the dawn, waiting for a fifty dollar sucker. Those of us who worked late night surveillance with Pac-Con always called it the garbage detail.

  Jack was oblivious to those eyes.

  "Is Riki always like this around you?"

  His smile didn't fade. "Always."

  "Maybe he's proud of his kid brother."

  He sloughed it off. "It takes no brains to be a hero. That day I had no brains at all." From another man, it might have been a back-handed compliment. But Jack said it absently, as if he had said it before and knew no one understood.

  I've known men like Jack Anatole before. You don't spend your army time as an MP and not know them. Or back down from them, either. The Vietnam Vet was the American Itch. The hero came home and found everybody chasing Patty Hearst. He could give his life for his country, but his country acted ashamed of him. As if everyone expects a vet to be two years behind everybody else. Why haven't they caught on yet?

  "Maybe it was just bad luck," I suggested.

  "Look at me," Jack said. "Baking dead fish for sportsmen. Slice them and soak them in brine, wash them in cold water and dry them in the air, then into the oven for smoking."

  He toyed with a thread on his rubber apron. He tugged at it, and it came free in a long string. He looked at it as if it were the thread to his future, and dropped it quickly, as if his future frightened him.

  He snorted. "I see the old guys, the union men, working on their pensions, and I see how wacked out they get. How do I know I won't end up like them? How do I know I'm not going to be doing this forever?"

  Riki came back. He said he had to leave us for a while. We said it was no problem, but he apologized anyway. I waited until Riki left, then started again with his brother.

  "Does Riki know how you feel?"

  "It's my problem, not his."

  "You can't talk with him?"

  "He's turning forty next month," Jack said. "Forty can be hell when you're insecure."

  "I noticed that."

  "It's his wife. She loves his ass. She's like some crazy parasite, sucking him dry with love. She can't walk across the street without his help."

  "His wife's upstairs," I told him.

  "Lilian? Jesus, remind me not to go upstairs."

  "You don't hit it off together."

  He shook his head "The way she spends money, you'd think she was Jackie O. Sure, Riki's got some bucks, and he gets the rest next month, but if he were on his deathbed, you'd have to call I. Magnin's to get her to come home."

  "Nobody's that money hungry."

  "Let me straighten you. She doesn't chase money. She just spends it. She doesn't know where it comes from. If it weren't for Riki, she'd be on welfare."

  "Doesn't she have any of her own?"

  "She had some. She was cut off when they got married. Riki almost got cut off, too, but Grandfather spared him."

  "They had marriage problems?"

  "Oh yeah. She'd been married before, and it didn't work out. She and Riki were childhood sweethearts and she latched onto him like a barnacle. Nobody wanted them to get married, but they wouldn't listen. You can't fight a marriage made in heaven."

  "He didn't have much say in the matter?"

  "That's about it. She swept him off his feet. He liked her well enough, but he never expected to marry her."

  "Is that why he chases women?"

  "He doesn't catch them."

  "Not ever?"

  He had a sad grin. "Have
you ever seen a dog on a leash humping another dog? That's how Riki chases women. He's just going through the motions."

  "So why does he bother?"

  "He can't get it at home." Jack's smile held more irony than humor. "She's turned to ice."

  "She's frigid?"

  "That's about the size of it. Some kind of psychological hang-up. He told me about it once. He had too many scotch-overs."

  "So why does he stick with her ?"

  "He's got his reasons." Jack looked over, as if noticing me for the first time. "I forgot your name."

  "Brennen. Michael Brennen."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Looking for Dani," I said.

  His eyes tightened. "Are you a cop?" He had old eyes in a young face. Cold eyes that had seen too much blood and death and violence. He had eyes that would die for friendship, eyes that make few new friends. A man would have to be a fool or a madman not to back down from them.

  "I'm a private investigator."

  He was wary now. "What do you want with me?" He had been too long in the stockade. He was toughening up.

  "Whatever I can get. Probably more than you plan on telling me. It doesn't have to be the truth. Whatever you feel like saying, it'll be more than you plan to say."

  "I want to tell you nothing."

  "I can see that."

  "Look, I don't dig somebody following her around, trying to find out what she's been up to. Who gives you the right to interfere with anybody else's life?"

  "I get paid for it. Sometimes I do it for nothing. This time around I'm getting paid to find Dani and I'm going to find her."

  "Like hell you will."

  "You're not very cooperative, are you?"

  "Why should I be? I'm not following people around, prying into their lives, bugging relatives and friends, just so I can make a few bucks. Why should I help you?"

  "Joey Crawford's dead."

  He took the news well. Only his eyes made any movement. They flickered for an instant, then stilled like the ocean at night. "How did it happen?"

  "Auto accident on the Golden Gate this morning. He was in the city, heading back to the houseboats. There was a car stalled in the right lane. He never saw it."