“Well, what did you do?”
“I found out his name and I went to see him one night last week. I confronted him with knowledge of his guilt. He denied it, naturally; he kept right on denying it to the end.”
“The end?”
“When I killed him,” DeBeque said.
Kaprelian’s neck went cold. “Killed him? Fred, you can’t be serious! You didn’t actually kill him—”
“Don’t sound so shocked,” DeBeque said. “What else could I do? I had no evidence, I couldn’t take him to the police. But neither could I allow him to get away with what he’d done to Karen. You understand that, don’t you? I had no choice. I took out the gun I’d picked up in a pawnshop, and I shot him with it — right through the heart.”
“Jeez,” Kaprelian said. “Jeez.”
DeBeque stopped smiling then and frowned down into his ginger ale; he was silent, kind of moody all of a sudden. Kaprelian became aware of how quiet it was and flipped on the TV. While he was doing that the two workers got up from their stools at the other end of the bar, waved at him, and went on out.
DeBeque said suddenly, “Only then I realized he couldn’t have been the one.”
Kaprelian turned from the TV. “What?”
“It couldn’t have been the mailman,” DeBeque said. “He was left-handed, and the police established that the killer was probably right-handed. Something about the angle of the blow that killed Karen. So I started thinking who else it could have been, and then I knew: the grocery delivery boy. Except we used two groceries, two delivery boys, and it turned out both of them were right-handed. I talked to the first and I was sure he was the one. I shot him. Then I knew I’d been wrong, it was the other one. I shot him too.”
“Hey,” Kaprelian said. “Hey, Fred, what’re you saying?”
“But it wasn’t the delivery boys either.” DeBeque’s eyes were very bright. “Who, then? Somebody else from the neighborhood... and it came to me, I knew who it had to be.”
Kaprelian still didn’t quite grasp what he was hearing. It was all coming too fast. “Who?” he said.
“You,” DeBeque said, and it wasn’t until he pulled the gun that Kaprelian finally understood what was happening, what DeBeque had really turned into after those three grieving, alcoholic months. Only by then it was too late.
The last thing he heard was voices on the television — a crime drama, one of those where the guy’s wife is murdered and he goes out and finds the real killer and ends up a hero in time for the last commercial...
Smuggler’s Island
The first I heard that somebody had bought Smuggler’s Island was late on a cold, foggy morning in May. Handy Manners and Davey and I had just brought the Jennie Too into the Camaroon Bay wharf, loaded with the day’s limit in salmon — silvers mostly, with a few big kings — and Handy had gone inside the processing shed at Bay Fisheries to call for the tally clerk and the portable scales. I was helping Davey hoist up the hatch covers, and I was thinking that he handled himself fine on the boat and what a shame it’d be if he decided eventually that he didn’t want to go into commercial fishing as his livelihood. A man likes to see his only son take up his chosen profession. But Davey was always talking about traveling around Europe, seeing some of the world, maybe finding a career he liked better than fishing. Well, he was only nineteen. Decisions don’t come quick or easy at that age.
Anyhow, we were working on the hatch covers when I heard somebody call my name. I glanced up, and Pa and Abner Frawley were coming toward us from down-wharf, where the café was. I was a little surprised to see Pa out on a day like this; he usually stayed home with Jennie when it was overcast and windy because the fog and cold air aggravated his lumbago.
The two of them came up and stopped, Pa puffing on one of his home-carved meerschaum pipes. They were both seventy-two and long-retired — Abner from a manager’s job at the cannery a mile up the coast, Pa from running the general store in the village — and they’d been cronies for at least half their lives. But that was where all resemblance between them ended. Abner was short and round and white-haired, and always had a smile and a joke for everybody. Pa, on the other hand, was tall and thin and dour; if he’d smiled any more than four times in the forty-seven years since I was born I can’t remember it. Abner had come up from San Francisco during the Depression, but Pa was a second-generation native of Camaroon Bay, his father having emigrated from Ireland during the short-lived potato boom in the early 1900s. He was a good man and a decent father, which was why I’d given him a room in our house when Ma died six years ago, but I’d never felt close to him.
He said to me, “Looks like a good catch, Verne.”
“Pretty good,” I said. “How come you’re out in this weather?”
“Abner’s idea. He dragged me out of the house.”
I looked at Abner. His eyes were bright, the way they always got when he had a choice bit of news or gossip to tell. He said, “Fella from Los Angeles went and bought Smuggler’s Island. Can you beat that?”
“Bought it?” I said. “You mean outright?”
“Yep. Paid the county a hundred thousand cash.”
“How’d you hear about it?”
“Jack Kewin, over to the real estate office.”
“Who’s the fellow who bought it?”
“Name’s Roger Vauclain,” Abner said. “Jack don’t know any more about him. Did the buying through an agent.”
Davey said, “Wonder what he wants with it?”
“Maybe he’s got ideas of hunting treasure,” Abner said and winked at him. “Maybe he heard about what’s hidden in those caves.”
Pa gave him a look. “Old fool,” he said.
Davey grinned, and I smiled a little and turned to look to where Smuggler’s Island sat wreathed in fog half a mile straight out across the choppy harbor. It wasn’t much to look at, from a distance or up close. Just one big oblong chunk of eroded rock about an acre and a half in size, surrounded by a lot of little islets. It had a few stunted trees and shrubs, and a long headland where gulls built their nests, and a sheltered cove on the lee shore where you could put in a small boat. That was about all there was to it — except for those caves Abner had spoken of.
They were located near the lee cove and you could only get into them at low tide. Some said caves honeycombed the whole underbelly of the island, but those of us who’d ignored warnings from our parents as kids and gone exploring in them knew that this wasn’t so. There were three caves and two of them had branches that led deep into the rock, but all of the tunnels were dead ends.
This business of treasure being hidden in one of those caves was just so much nonsense, of course — sort of a local legend that nobody took seriously. What the treasure was supposed to be was two million dollars in greenbacks that had been hidden by a rackets courier during Prohibition, when he’d been chased to the island by a team of Revenue agents. There was also supposed to be fifty cases of high-grade moonshine secreted there.
The bootlegging part of it had a good deal of truth though. This section of the northern California coast was a hotbed of illegal liquor traffic in the days of the Volstead Act, and the scene of several confrontations between smugglers and Revenue agents; half a dozen men on both sides had been killed, or had turned up missing and presumed dead. The way the bootleggers worked was to bring ships down from Canada outfitted as distilleries — big stills in their holds, bottling equipment, labels for a dozen different kinds of Canadian whiskey — and anchor them twenty-five miles offshore. Then local fishermen and imported hirelings would go out in their boats and carry the liquor to places along the shore, where trucks would be waiting to pick it up and transport it down to San Francisco or east into Nevada. Smuggler’s Island was supposed to have been a short-term storage point for whiskey that couldn’t be trucked out right away, which may or may not have been a true fact. At any rate, that was how the island got its name.