“Where is it?”
“At the Meridian. Ever been there?”
“I’ve been by there a number of times, of course.”
“Then you’ll enjoy seeing it from the inside,” she said. “Twenty-seven floors of good views and fabulous views. Mine’s fabulous. On the bay side, of course. It’s a getaway nest. Willis hates it. I love it. I have everything I want there, including lots of service and lots of protection. You could easily get used to it, Jules, if you’re like me.”
“I better go up topside and talk to Willis,” Jules said. “He’ll wonder what’s happened to me.”
“Eight o’clock, Jules,” she said. “I’ll have something for us. A light supper, maybe.”
“Sounds perfect,” Jules said.
When he climbed up to the fly bridge, he brought a fresh drink for Willis Ross. The lawyer looked surprised, as though he’d forgotten that Jules was aboard. As though he’d forgotten that anyone was aboard. Willis Ross was in his element, and Jules had no doubt that when the lawyer retired he’d set foot on land only when he had to.
They were well offshore by then, but the oceanfront homes along La Jolla’s Gold Coast were large enough to be clearly seen and admired, even from that distance. As a lad, Jules had attended many parties in that row of homes, where ocean breakers would explode against offshore rocks and hurl foam and spray fifty feet in the air. Where well-to-do young revelers drank punch laced with hidden bottles of gin, and the green sloping lawns and ocean surf were bathed in white light. When you could not help but believe that youth and summer would never end.
Perhaps because of Jules’s troubled look Willis Ross said to him, “Let’s just enjoy the ride for a little while. Lemme get her turned around and headed back into the bay; then I’ll put on my powdered wig and try to help you with your problem.”
With a toss of his head toward the saloon, Jules said, “Is Lou okay alone or should I …”
“Don’t worry about Lou,” the lawyer said. “She’ll be in the stateroom having her afternoon snooze any minute now. She can’t stay awake after her noon cocktails.”
CHAPTER 17
While Jules Temple cruised unhappily in the placid waters of San Diego Harbor, Fin Finnegan foundered in the turbulent waters of show biz.
“I’m not surprised,” he said to his agent when he received Orson’s call at the police substation.
“I’m shocked,” Orson said. “It wasn’t too much dialogue for you, was it?”
“He’s toast,” Fin said.
“What?”
“That was the dialogue. He’s toast.”
“That was it?”
“I said it every way I could think of. I coulda done it in Uzbek, but it wouldn’t of mattered. Can you get me a second chance with somebody that has better karma?”
“I don’t see how I can go around her.”
“Orson, I’m not asking to play Macbeth at the Old Globe!”
“I can try.”
“In the length of time it took you to get me the last job, Russia turned democratic. Can you be a little more speedy?”
After his agent hung up Fin was even too depressed to wallow, so he called Nell Salter.
“Good day to you!” he said.
“By that delighted exclamation, this can’t be Detective Fin-negan,” she said. “He’d be attending an A.A. meeting today.”
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “I don’t usually …”
“Yeah, you said. You don’t usually.”
“By way of apology, let’s do lunch. Sorry, I was just talking to my agent. Let’s have lunch.”
“Too much work to do.”
He tried another tack: “I was thinking about driving over to that waste hauling company. You know, Green Earth?”
“Why in the world would you do that?”
“Well, the stolen-vehicle report was made here at Southern, wasn’t it? In my presence. So I’ve got a proprietary interest in this case. I think I oughtta talk to the truckers in more detail. There’re a lotta part-time truckers and full-time thieves hanging around Angel’s Cafe where the truck got ripped off. These Green Earth truckers might have a thought or two now that they’ve had time to remember. Like who they mighta seen there on the day in question.”
“That’s remote,” she said.
“Sure, but it’s worth doing because of the load they lost, isn’t it? I mean, if I can get a lead on the suspect, I might find the stuff. The truck thief died from it, so maybe I don’t want someone else to die. I thought you might feel the same way.”
That neurotic little bastard was laying a guilt trip on her! And it worked! “Okay,” Nell said, sighing. “I’ll meet you at Green Earth in thirty minutes. But I can’t do lunch.”
“See you there,” Fin said.
When he hung up, he opened his desk drawer and gathered his electric razor, his shaving lotion, and his emergency toothbrush. He figured that after he did the cursory questioning of the two drivers, he’d be able to persuade her to have a burrito at his favorite Mexican joint on Palm Avenue where all the cops and Border Patrol did lunch.
They were well inside the jetty, cruising past a buoy where, on this sunny afternoon, three adult sea lions shared their space with two young ones. Every animal was asleep and did not stir when the yacht motored past them.
Jules and Willis Ross still sat quietly on the fly bridge, the lawyer looking up when they passed under the Coronado Bridge. It soared 246 feet above the water, and was dedicated in 1969 by then Governor Ronald Reagan. Since then, more than 150 pitiful wretches had leaped from it into the cold dark water.
After they’d passed the bridge Willis Ross slowed to watch the Navy SEALs practicing helicopter drops and pickups in the south bay. Only when he tired of it did he finally turn to Jules and say, “Okay, tell me your troubles.”
“Not my troubles,” Jules said. “Troubles belonging to the guy who’s buying my business. Troubles from his other waste hauling company.”
“Then tell me why I should be giving free legal advice to some guy I don’t know.”
“I’m asking you for myself,” Jules said quickly. “Because if he gets in trouble with the EPA or the D.A., he might not be able to close escrow. That’s why I’m so worried about what happens to him.”
“Okay, as long as it’s for you, gimme the whole scenario.”
“Apparently a couple of his waste haulers, truckers with brains like insect larvae, might’ve dumped a load of hazardous waste that they should’ve returned to his yard for proper transfer to a disposal site. And somebody might get very sick from the dumped material.”
“I’d say the truckers’re in big trouble, but the owner of the company isn’t in trouble unless he knowingly committed an offense. Did he know they were gonna dump it?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Then I think he’s okay.”
“But there’s a hitch. See, he’d improperly manifested that load of waste. He’d shown it to be one thing on the manifest when really it was much more dangerous than what he showed. And he was gonna haul it to an improper site and dispose of it in an improper manner. That improper site was also listed on the manifest.”
“Improper? You mean, unlawful?”
“Let’s say unlawful. But whatever happened, it occurred before he had a chance to transfer it to the unlawful site.”
“Let me get this straight. The truckers just took it upon themselves to dump the stuff. Why?”
“Who knows why? They’re scum of the earth, all of them. We’re not sure why they’d do such a thing.”
“Well,” the lawyer said, “it’s gonna look pretty bad for the owner of the business. He did some tricky stuff on the manifest, you say? It could be alleged that by not alerting his employees to what dangerous material they had, he’d contributed to their later actions of dumping what they couldn’t have known was extremely dangerous.”