“And you need it done yesterday, right?”
“Today would be all right.”
He said he would be in the field until four or so and to call back then and I hung up and thought about my next step. Deciding a little soft-shoe might be appropriate, I dropped another quarter and dialed Rhonda Anixter’s number. Her voice was as sultry as her body — husky and vaporous.
“Mrs. Rhonda Anixter?”
“Yes?”
“This is Bob Exley at the Collection Department of Pacific Bell. I’m calling to inform you, Mrs. Anixter, that unless we receive immediate payment for last month’s bill, your phone will be disconnected on the first—”
The huskiness turned into a growl. “What the hell are you talking about? I paid that bill two weeks ago.”
“What was the date and number of the check and at what bank do you have your checking account?”
“Security National, West L.A. Pico branch,” she said in a vexed voice. “I’ll have to look up the number.”
“Just a minute, Mrs. Anixter, that may not be necessary. Running this through again, I see that the computer posted your check late, for some reason. I’m very sorry to have bothered you.”
“Sure you are,” she said in a nasty tone, and hung up.
I called Troy Wilcox. Troy was chief loan officer at L.A. First Federal, and two years ago, while working on an entirely different matter, I’d saved his ass when I tumbled onto a man who had skipped on a $75,000 bank loan Troy had okayed for him. Ever since, Troy had always been pleased to help me out with a favor when I needed one. And just as he would be pleased to do me a favor, the people at Security National would be pleased to do him one. There is no such thing as privileged information in the banking fraternity.
I was batting a thousand today; Troy was in a good mood, too. I gave him Rhonda Anixter’s name and told him him I needed to know if she had written any checks for sizeable amounts in the past two months, and if so, to whom. He told me to get back to him a little before three, that he should have the information by then.
Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do until that time, I went home to pack.
Both Al and Troy were ready for me when I got back to them that afternoon, and on the red-eye to Miami, I mulled over what they had given me.
Chip and Rhonda’s joint account at Security National showed a balance of $746.98. Only two checks of any sizeable amount had been written by either of them in the past two months, one on September 1 to Wynee World Travel for $3500, which would have been for the Caribbean trip, and another a week later to “Cash,” for $2000, which was more than likely for vacation spending money. I hadn’t really expected Troy to come up with anything incriminating; if Rhonda Anixter had paid someone to kill her husband and make it look like an accident, she wouldn’t have been likely to write him a check from their joint account.
Al’s stuff was more interesting. Rhonda had no record in California, but the Vice boys knew all about Phalen. Besides being the owner on record of the Paradise, Phalen was part-owner and front man for two other topless bars that were suspected of being laundries for mob money; he was also the main man at New Eros, a distributor of hard-core porn films and magazines. He had been popped three times — for extortion, pandering, and burning with intent to defraud an insurer — but never convicted. That last one particularly interested me. The arrest report had been filed by the Sheriff’s Office, and I asked Al if he could pull it for me. After three-and-a-half minutes of bitching and moaning about how busy he was, he finally agreed, but said it would take a couple of days. I told him I’d be in touch, threw my bag in the car, and drove out to LAX.
My flight didn’t leave until eleven-ten, and the three double-vodkas I absorbed in the airport terminal bar and the two more I ingested on the plane allowed me to sleep straight through to Miami. After a two-hour layover there and another three hours on an Eastern 727, I was sober, awake, and buckling up for a landing in St. Maarten.
From the air, one side of the island didn’t look any different from the other — it just looked like one tiny green teardrop surrounded by a blue-green sea that seemed to change color on a whim — but according to the Caribbean guidebook I’d picked up in the Miami airport gift shop, St. Maarten/St. Martin had the distinction of being the smallest island in the world with two sovereignties. The French and Dutch both settled the island in the early 1600s, and legend had it that instead of fighting for possession, they’d decided to divvy it up by a walking contest. One man from each side walked around the island in opposite directions, and where they met determined the border. I hoped the resolution of my current case would be as peaceful.
I checked in at the Sheraton near the airport and caught a cab into Philipsburg, the Dutch capital. It was a cloudless, balmy day in the small, dusty town strung out along a sandbar that ran between the sea and a large salt marsh. Front Street, the main drag, was narrow and congested with cars and people, and the cab seemed to make about four feet an hour.
I tried to get into the laid-back Caribbean mentality by sightseeing out the window.
The town had an eclectic ambiance to it, which was a nice way of saying it was a mish-mash of architectural styles. Modern glass-sheeted shopping malls were stuck between old, pastel painted, colonial-style buildings and slat wood, front-porched houses. No matter how different the buildings were in appearance, they all had the same function — to sell to the shorts-clad, window-gaping army of tourists laden with cameras and chicly imprinted shopping bags as they thronged the sun-drenched sidewalks.
The police station was one of the older colonial buildings, at the end of Front Street. After identifying myself to the desk sergeant, I was turned over to a surly black cop named Cribbs who had handled the Anixter investigation. His attitude thawed a bit when I assured him I had not come all this way to question his competence, rather to consult his expertise.
Chip Anixter’s diving equipment was in a storage room in back. There was a weight belt, an air tank with the regulator still attached, and what was left of a pair of trunks. The trunks were shredded but the eight or nine cuts in the weight belt looked too clean to have been made by any fish. When I mentioned that to Cribbs, he just shrugged, and said in his West Indian accent, “You ever see a shark’s teeth? They are as sharp as razor blades.” There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing with him. Besides the lacerations in the weight belt and the fact that the tank was empty of air when it was found, the equipment checked out okay and did not seem to have been tampered with in any way.
The diving instructor Chip had gone down with, Stuart Murphy, was a California transplant who had come to St. Maarten eight years ago and started Mako Water Sports, an operation specializing in recreational dives. Except for Chip, the company had a perfect safety record, and Cribbs considered Murphy beyond suspicion. As for Rhonda Anixter, Cribbs thought her “cold” considering what had happened, but that was no crime. She couldn’t have had anything to do with the accident, because she had never left the boat during the dive. The entire incident was an unfortunate accident, but that was all it was. I thanked him and left.
Mako Water Sports was in a small wooden building that sat at the edge of a yacht marina. The desk inside was surrounded by racks of life vests, regulators, and air tanks. The man sitting behind it was a rangy, freckled, beachy type with a bleached-out mustache and pink splotches on his prematurely balding head where the skin had sunburned and peeled off. He wore swim trunks and a short-sleeved shirt covered with red hibiscus.
“I’m looking for Stu Murphy.”