surely don‟t need such as that at this time.”
“Doe and I are old friends. Did it occur to you that I may be able to help?”
“Keep away from her!” he screamed.
“Mind your own fucking business,” I said softly, and left the room.
“What was that all about?” Dutch asked as I joined them.
“Titan got a little out of line,” I said.
“Titan doesn‟t get out of line,” Dutch said.
“Wrong,” I said. “He just did.”
We hung around for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was obvious that Raines‟ time was running
out, but the doctor was playing his prognosis close to the chest. Doe stayed in the unit with
Raines while Titan and Donleavy were knee to knee, palavering in the waiting room,
probably deciding who would replace Raines in the political structure. There were several
uniformed police hanging around and there was nothing further we could do, so we moved on
after I scribbled a brief note to Doe with some phone numbers on it and left it with a nurse.
It had cleared up outside. A warm summer wind had blown away the storm, leaving behind a
beautiful starry night. Dutch, Stick, and I drove back to the park in silence, each of us in his
own way trying to make sense out of what appeared to be a senseless holocaust plaguing
Doomstown.
There was still a light fog hanging over the Quadrangle, like a wisp of cloud, but I could see
across it to Warehouse Three, on the opposite side. Cobblestone walkways crisscrossed the
park like an asterisk, intersecting at its centre. One of them dissected the park and ran straight
to the river‟s edge; another ran between the bank and Warehouse Three.
Plainclothesmen and uniformed cops were still examining the scene and had extended their
yellow control ribbons around the entire park.
Raines had met his assailant about halfway between the back of the park, where Dutch‟s ear
witnesses were searching for the lost necklace, and the river. I stood next to the chalked form
on the walk and looked back and forth. Chip and his fiancée had been less than thirty yards
away when Raines was shot.
“I wonder what direction Raines was walking in and where he was going,” I mused aloud.
“His Mercedes is parked down behind the bank,” Stick offered.
I walked the fifty yards or so down to the river‟s edge. What had once been a dock had been
converted into a small fishing pier. The dark river swirled past its pillars, gurgling up small
black whirlpools. The river walk ran from River Road, where it turned and coursed up an
embankment to the highway above, along the river bank, and behind three warehouses that
had been converted into office buildings.
“Findley Enterprises is in Warehouse Three, next to the park, and Costello and Cohen have
their offices in One. That‟s three buildings down on the end,” Dutch offered.
I looked tip and down the river, then back toward the museum and the spot where Raines was
shot.
“Any ideas?” said Dutch.
I had a lot of ideas, all of them pure guesswork, none of them provable, and none I cared to
share at that moment.
“Not really,” I said. “How about you two?”
“Let‟s say Raines parked his car over at the bank and started across the pork toward the
Findley office,” Stick said. “That young couple was twenty, thirty yards away, talking. The
killer must have heard them. Seems to me whoever did the trick had to know the park pretty
well.”
“And knew which way Raines was coming, so he or she knew exactly where to wait,” Dutch
conjectured.
“And was pretty desperate,” I concluded.
“How so?” said Dutch.
“To shoot him down with witnesses a few yards away,” I said. “I call that taking a chance.”
We walked back toward the bank, looking on all sides of the walkways, but found nothing
else of interest. The locals had obviously worked the place over. I stood at the shooting site
for a moment or two more.
“Could‟ve been Nance,” said the Stick. “Could‟ve come down from Costello‟s office, waited
until Raines parked his car, started across the park, done the deed, and run back to Costello‟s
office.”
“Maybe,” I said. “A lot of maybes, as usual.”
“Why don‟t we talk this out over a piece of pie and coffee,” Dutch said. “This caught me in
the middle of dinner.”
“Suppose it wasn‟t Nance,” I said. “Suppose it was somebody who was so desperate they had
to take a chance and blitz Raines on the spot. What would they do?”
“Run in the opposite direction from the witnesses,” Dutch said. “Down toward the river.”
“Yeah,” 1 said. “And if they were real desperate, they might have ditched the weapon.”
“In the river,” Stick said.
“Exactly,” I agreed.
“George Baker,” both Stick and Dutch said in unison.
“Who‟s George Baker?” I asked.
“The best black-water diver in these parts,” said Dutch. “If there‟s a gun in the river, he‟ll
find it.”
“Think it‟s worth a chance?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” said Stick. “George‟d leave a movie queen‟s bed to go diving. It‟s how
he gets his jollies.”
“Then let‟s get him,” I said.
“How about pie and coffee?” Dutch implored.
“Let‟s see if we can dig up Baker first,” I said.
64
BLACK-WATER DIVE
Stick found Baker at home watching television. The diver, excited by the prospect of finding the
murder weapon, promised to keep his mouth shut and be on the pier at first light. Coffee and pie
brought Stick, Dutch, and me nothing but endless speculation. We packed it in early and I went to bed
after checking the hospital and being told that Raines‟ condition was “guarded.”
At five thirty am. I was back at the park with Stick, huddled over the river‟s edge in fog thicker than
the previous night‟s, sipping black coffee from a plastic cup and listening to George Baker describe
what he and his partner were about to do. Baker was a big man with a barrel chest, hulking shoulders,
a neck like a spare tire, and black hair cut shorter than a buck private‟s. A telephone man by trade, he
was a black-water diver by avocation and an auxiliary policeman, whatever that was, for the hell of it.
“It‟s dark down there,” he said dramatically as he pulled on his wet suit. His patois, a blend of
southern colloquial and old English, was as descriptive as it was archaic. He sounded like the hawker
for an old medicine show.
“Yessir, dark and dangerous. Don‟t take much more‟n a Mexico minute for a man to perish under
these waters. A man cannot afford errors of the mind, for you don‟t make any miscalculations, least
not more than once. Why, sir, I dive in waters so dark, even a torch will hardly cut their swarthy
depths. The bottom is either sugar mud, which is shifty and quicksandy, or it‟s covered with old, rusty
cables, the likes of an octopus, and old boat propellers, tin cans, and other such various obstacles from
time past when this here was a pier for mighty ships of the sea. Why, say, at high noon, it‟s so dark at
the depths of fifteen feet, I must, by needs, do everything by the touch of these here fingers.”
He wobbled ten fingers at us, just in case we didn‟t know what a finger was, and stared at them
himself with awe.
“Yessir,” he said, „sometimes there ain‟t nothin‟ twixt me and the Almighty but a measly ol‟
fingerprint.”
The bottom, Baker told us, sloped away from the bank for about thirty feet, then dropped off sharply
into the channel. He would use what he called his “tender system,” a ball of twine that he ran from