“What comes after that recross stuff?”
“You may be requested to keep yourself available for further questioning later in the trial.”
“Jeez almighty, I could be here till Christmas.”
“A murder trial is not conducted for the convenience of witnesses. You may consider it bad luck to have been in that particular place at that particular time, but eventually you may come to realize it was good luck because it enabled you to help justice prevail.”
“I don’t want to be a witness. I didn’t see nobody kill nobody.”
“You told me you heard screams in the night. That makes you the last person to hear Mrs. Pherson’s voice.”
“Maybe it wasn’t her voice. Maybe it was the radio.”
“Richie will testify that he, too, heard the screams.”
“Why’d you have to drag a kid his age into it?”
“I didn’t drag him; I didn’t drag you. That’s just the way it happened.”
“It could still of been the radio.”
“You also told me Cully King was drinking heavily and that he has a reputation for violence when he’s drunk.”
“A lot of my friends do.”
“An hour or so after you heard screaming you went up on deck to check a loose cable and you saw Cully King throw some clothing overboard.”
“It could of been trash.”
“What’s the matter, Harry? Up until now you’ve been pretty positive about the woman’s screams and the clothes being thrown overboard.”
“I want to go home. I don’t like it here. I don’t like the way my kid is acting, hanging out with those bums at the waterfront and him only fifteen.”
Owen thought of his own son Chadwick, barely a year younger than Richie but a mere child in comparison. He said, “You’re lucky, Harry, to have a responsible, hardworking son like Richie.”
“No luck about it. I brung him up like that.”
“Be at my office at nine o’clock Monday morning,” Owen said, “and don’t bring Richie. He’s not allowed in the courtroom except during his time on the stand. Nine o’clock and be prompt.”
“Who says?”
“The state of California says.”
There was a long silence, then Harry’s voice, tight and high as if it had squeezed past clenched teeth: “I’ll be there.”
Harry hung up and replaced the telephone on the bedside table. Propped up against two pillows, he looked like a huge man with a barrel chest and overdeveloped deltoids that made him appear neckless. Below the waist he was small and scrawny. All of him was black, the purplish black of the native West Indian. He could climb a mast with the agility of a monkey climbing a coconut tree and slide down again without a drop of blood on his calloused hands. Like Cully King, he’d gone to sea as a boy, but he lacked Cully’s brains and perseverance and remained semiliterate. He couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt to computers. They reawakened superstitions long buried, and their language was that of a hostile and barbarous tribe.
He turned on the television set and watched an old movie until Richie came home. It was after ten.
“Where you been?” Harry said.
“Out.”
“Where is out?”
“The opposite of in.”
“That supposed to be funny?”
“Maybe it wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t. So start over. Where you been?”
“Hanging around.”
“Hanging around where, who, what for?”
Richie sat down in the only upholstered chair in the room. He was taller than his father, and lighter-skinned, but he had equally heavy shoulders and arms. He was always growing into or growing out of things. The happy medium passed as quickly as any moment of happiness.
He pulled at the hairs of the seedling mustache on his upper lip to stimulate its growth while his father watched in disapproval.
“You should wash your face better,” Harry said. “So you been out hanging around, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What part of out and what part of around?”
“I was drifting. You know, doing this and that.”
“What’s a this?”
“I played a few video games.”
“Where did you get the money?”
“Helped a guy launch his trimaran this afternoon. Then I walked out to the end of the breakwater to look at the Bewitched. She’s still got some kind of security guard on her. It’s funny, her just sitting there dead in the water when we worked so hard to bring her here for the big race.”
“Hard work never killed nobody.”
“I wouldn’t mind staying here if they let us live on board.”
“We’re going home soon,” Harry said. “I take the stand Monday, and after they finish with me, it’ll be your turn.”
“I got nothing to say against Cully. He’s a good guy, like a father to me.”
“How come you need two fathers?”
It was an old jealousy that cropped up every now and then like a persistent weed. It could be trampled on, mowed down or even uprooted, but it always returned, nurtured by an unalterable fact: Harry and his wife were very dark while Richie’s skin was copper-colored like Cully’s. Harry had never voiced his suspicion, but his friends all knew about it. So did Richie, who was pleased at the idea and looked for secret signs from Cully that it was true.
“I don’t need two fathers,” Richie said. “One is enough.”
“Maybe too much, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say it, but I heard it.”
Harry laughed. He appreciated his own jokes so much that he didn’t care whether other people did or not.
“You want to watch some TV?” Harry said.
Richie shook his head. “Why do they think Cully killed that lady?”
“Money.”
“Cully don’t need money. He’s happy like he is, a ship under him and chicks laying the right moves on him.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Flinging themselves at him.”
“No chicks flang themselves at him that I ever seen. Some old hookers, sure. Every guy gets flang at by some old hookers. You know what a hooker is?”
“Sure.”
“Then stay away from them.”
Richie grunted. Every conversation with his father seemed to end the same way: Do this or don’t do this. It was safer to steer the subject back to Cully, who never cared what people told him to do or not to do. Me and Cully, we’re a lot alike. When they let him go, when we get back to the islands, I’m going to come right out and ask him to tell me the truth: that he’s my real father. Maybe him and me will live together just like an ordinary family.
“If he killed the lady for money,” Richie said, “how come he didn’t get it?”
“He got some. The rest he hasn’t had a chance to sell yet.”
“What rest?”
“The jewels in the green case.”
“I don’t think there was jewels in that case. It didn’t feel like it, didn’t rattle or jangle.”
“How do you know that?”
“She let me carry it for her.”
“When?”
“Once.”
“The stuff must of been all wrapped in cotton. That’s it, stuff wrapped in cotton don’t rattle.” Harry scratched one of his shoulders. It bulged purple-black like an eggplant. “You carried it for her once?”
“Yeah.”
“What once?”
“I don’t remember. Just a once like any other.”
Harry knew he was lying, but something warned him not to try to force or finesse the truth out of him. The truth was often something to stay away from.
“Let’s watch TV,” Harry said. “You want to watch some TV?”
“I don’t care.”
“Okay, you pick the program.”
“No, you pick it.”