“You’ve found him,” he said, smiling broadly. He had a lot of nice, white teeth.
“My name is Asch.” I handed him a card. “I’m down here working on the Anixter case. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you could spare a little time—” He looked at the card and frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m very busy.”
I looked around the room. There didn’t seem to be too much happening in it.
“I told everything I know to the police,” he said, picking up my skeptical look. “Why don’t you talk to them?”
“I did. They absolved you of all guilt in the matter. That’s not why I’m here. There is a lot of insurance money involved and Chip’s father is concerned that his son’s death might have been the result of foul play. Was there anything that struck you as peculiar about his disappearance?”
“Yeah,” he said sourly. “The whole damned thing. Believe it or not, mister, I’m not used to having my clients disappear on me.”
“That wasn’t what I was implying.”
He made a face and let out a breath. “Look, I don’t mean to sound rude. But all I want is to put this thing behind me.” He waved a hand at the room. “It wasn’t exactly the greatest publicity for my business, as you can see.”
I took out my wallet, extracted a fifty-dollar bill, and laid it on the desk in front of him. “Would that cover a quick run out to where Chip disappeared? No equipment. We wouldn’t even have to break the surface.”
“What do you expect to see from the surface?”
“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.
He looked at the money, bit his lip thoughtfully, then put his hand over the bill and slid it toward him. He stood and went over to the rack of life vests, selected one, and tossed it at me. “You’d better put this on. If I lose one more client, I might as well close this place up and go back to the States.”
The trade winds were kicking up a good chop and my clothes were soaked by the time Murphy killed the engine of the speedboat and dropped anchor. “This is it,” he said.
We were two or three miles offshore and the water was dark blue, not green as it was in the sandy shallows closer to the island. The sunlight was clean and hard and glinted white off the surface of the sea. I looked down.
“How can you tell this is the exact spot?”
He smiled cryptically. “It’s my business.”
I let it go at that. “You two went down alone?”
He nodded. “He didn’t want to out with a group. Wanted a more personal dive, he said.”
“What kind of a diver was he? Good?”
The welcome warmth of the sun seeped through my wet clothes, taking the chill off.
“So he said. He was certified.”
“So what happened?”
“Good question. One minute, he was behind me, the next, he wasn’t. The only thing I can think of is that he got absorbed in something and got carried away by the current without realizing. It’s pretty strong here.”
“If the current is so strong, why did you pick this spot to dive?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “He did.”
“When was that?”
“The day before, when he came into the office. He said a friend of his wife who dove around here all the time recommended it.”
A mill wheel in my mind turned a notch and caught. “A friend of his wife?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Did he mention a name?”
“I don’t think so. I would’ve remembered if it was anybody local. Anybody local would’ve known there are better places to dive around here.”
The boat rocked in the waves and I put a hand on the windshield to steady myself. “Which way does the current run here?”
He waved a hand toward the green mountains of St. Maarten.
“Where did you find his gear?”
Again, he waved toward the island. “About four hundred yards from here.”
“I saw the stuff,” I said. “Cribbs seems to think a shark did the damage.”
“That’s possible,” he said. “They’re around.”
“Did you see one hanging around that day?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve seen them materalize like ghosts, out of nowhere.”
“The cuts in the weight belt looked more like they’d been made by a knife—”
“That’s possible, too. Anixter had a knife and he was out of air. The buckle on the belt was still fastened when I found it. Maybe it got stuck and he panicked and tried to cut it off. I’ve seen divers do screwier things in situations like that.”
“He cut off his trunks, too?”
He said nothing to that, just shrugged.
“Was that his own equipment?”
“No. It was mine.”
“How about his wife? Was she certified too?”
“No. She said she’d been down a couple of times, but didn’t like it. She just went along for the ride.”
“And she never left the boat the entire time you were under?”
“That’s one thing I’m positive about.”
“Did you see any other boats in the area?”
“Not that I remember.”
“You say the current is strong here. Strong enough to carry a man to shore?”
I went on with the train of thought. “Say a diver had been dropped off here earlier. Would it have been possible for him to have been waiting down there without you seeing him?”
“Maybe, if he was careful, and didn’t breathe a lot.” His eyes widened as the idea crystalized in his mind. “You think that’s what happened? You think somebody was waiting down there?”
“I’m just looking at all the possibilities.”
“Then what happened to the body?”
“If there were signs of violence on it, knife wounds, for instance, they would have to keep it from being found,” I speculated. “Who else knew where you were going to dive?”
“My partner, Sonny. But he had a group out that afternoon—”
“Don’t worry, I don’t consider him a suspect.”
He shrugged. “As far as I know, only the four of us knew.”
“How did Mrs. Anixter act when you told her you couldn’t find her husband?”
He looked at me strangely. “That was something that always bothered me.”
“Why?”
“When I came up with his equipment, she got hysterical. Cried and wailed all the way back to shore. She only stopped long enough to ask one question.”
“What was that?”
“She wanted to know what the waiting period was before someone was declared legally dead.”
The entire flight back to L.A. my thoughts drifted as unrelentingly toward the solution as that St. Maarten current ran toward shore. No matter how hard I tried to swim in other directions, I wound up heading the same way.
It was almost ten in the evening when I pulled into my parking slot in front of my apartment, dog-tired and suffering from an intense case of heartburn from the catered cardboard the Eastern stewardess had jokingly referred to as “dinner.” All I wanted was to make myself a strong drink and crawl into bed. I was definitely not in the mood for company; especially the two movie-extra heavies who detached themselves from the shadows and materialized on each side of my car.
They yanked open the doors and the one on the passenger’s side stuck a .45 Browning automatic in my face. He was big and beefy and had a wide, loose face that gravity had gone to work on. The face didn’t smile. “He’ll drive,” was all he said.
The one on the driver’s side nudged me, and I moved over to keep from being sat on. They wedged me in firmly between them and the driver backed my car out of the driveway. The gun was jammed up under my rib cage, making it hard to breathe. The driver turned right onto Pacific and headed toward the Marina. He was slimmer than the other one, with a bony brow and a nose that someone had rearranged onto the side of his face, then decided it looked better where it had been, and moved it back again.