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Splendor Bay

Copyright 2001 by LB Cobb. All rights reserved.

TWO

Saturday, May 26, 9:00 AM

I snapped a quick dozen shots of Silent Wallie before three carloads of state police barreled onto the beach, followed a few minutes later by two cars of FBI special agents. What with the uniformed state guys and Brooks-Brothered Feds assisting the locals in kicking sand at Moreno, it was clear my volunteer services were excess to the event. I left the other guys to play murder investigation and climbed the stairs to Sally's house. No one seemed to notice my leaving.

I showered, shaved, and changed into clothes that I kept at Sally's in case she wanted to dine out where shoes and shirt were required for service. I found a button-down shirt left over from my suit-wearing days, a clean pair of jeans, and a pair of tassel loafers. Socks were too formal for my planned activities. Having gotten myself presentable for snooping around Splendor Bay, I fixed an omelet, took it and a beer out to the deck, and watched the entertainment below through Sally's binoculars.

An hour passed while small groups of cops conferred with one another, milled about, conferred with other one-anothers. Lab guys showed up looking for something to collect. The governor and a few sprigs of seaweed were it. Two carloads of state cops loaded up, squealed onto the pavement, ran a red light to make the turn onto Cliff Road, and headed up the ridge in the general direction of Promontory Point. Then the rescue squad loaded the sun-ripening governor into the meat wagon for his trip to the county morgue in the basement of Brewer's funeral home in downtown Splendor Bay.

I felt a momentary pang of regret seeing those diamond studs drive away. They could have paid my tab at Fred's, a couple of months rent, and bought Baby some new brake shoes, with enough change left over for a day at the pony track. However, just knowing Moreno was now waiting his turn for the coroner's carving table tempered my regret immensely.

As soon as the recently departed governor departed the beach, the remaining state cops and the Feds took off in the same direction the first two cars had taken up the cliff. I briefly wondered what sort of cop convention was going on at Promontory Point today, then I turned my attention back to Gomez and Tiny, who had been left on the beach looking as if they had been told by their big brothers that they were too little to play cops and robbers.

The whole show was over in less than two hours. By then, it had turned into a dazzling morning. So resplendent a morning that even with the lingering pain in my head, I felt like exercising my inquisitive nature. I rejoined Tiny and Gomez on the beach to see what the official story was before I went snooping in town for gossip.

The only new information I picked up was that Moreno wasn't the only dead dude. His limo driver had been found in a burned-out crash just beyond Promontory Point, the reason the big cops had sped away in that direction. The crash site was outside the city limits and SBPD's jurisdiction, the reason Tiny and Gomez had been left behind, or so Tiny said.

Tiny readily confirmed my initial observation -- Moreno's cause of death wasn't immediately apparent. No gunshot wounds, no blows to the head, no slashed throat, no stab wounds, just dead and already stiff. That left a host of natural and unnatural causes of death for the coroner to choose from.

Gomez put his money on the safe bet -- drowning -- since the beach patrol had pumped a little sea foam out of Moreno before calling SBPD. Why he had gone for a swim in a tux wasn't a significant issue in Gomez's mind. Tiny picked the heart-attack-stroke-aneurysm category because of Moreno's age -- fifty-eight -- betting it occurred while Wallie was getting a little nooky on the beach. I placed my bet on drug-overdose because I preferred to think the worst of Wallie, and I didn't want to think about who the nookee might have been. Besides, this section of beach had its share of transactions which might lead to drug overdoses as thrilling as Viagra.

According to Tiny, the FBI was sending in an expert to assist the county coroner in analyzing Moreno's innards. The lab work would be expedited. Inquiring minds wanted to know. In the meantime, there were the matters of a state funeral and a successor to pick. And possibly a murderer to find.

The list of potential suspects was too long to go down the whodunit road, so we examined our political science knowledge and placed our bets. Tiny and I last had civics in high school, and Gomez had skipped that course, so our knowledge wasn't extensive. But we all agreed it would be the Vice President and then the Speaker of the House if Moreno had been President of the United States. Tiny and I remembered when Reagan was shot and knew for sure it wasn't Alexander Haig. Gomez was too young to remember Reagan or Haig, so he was easily convinced. None of us had any idea what happens in state government when you don't have a vice-governor, although we tried to remember what they called the job in Texas when Bush II resigned to be president.

Gomez put his money on the state controller since, according to Gomez, looking after the money is the most important job. Tiny picked the head guy of the state senate, whatever that job is called, because making the laws sounded like an important job to a peace officer. And I put my money on the attorney general. I knew her. We agreed a special election was in order.

"Well, it sounds like you have everything under control," I said, intending to climb the stairs back to Sally's place to see if I could summon the courage to test Baby's brakes down Cliff Road, or the larger question, whether I could make it down Cliff Road without winding up in the same condition as Moreno's limo driver. In addition to buying Baby some new shoes, I thought I might poke around to see if anyone had anything to say on the subject of Moreno's passing, starting at Oma's Kitchen, one of the few places where you can get any chitchat from anybody.

"Wait up a minute," Tiny said as he headed over to the cruiser. "I need to call in."

"Yeah, sure." I turned to take in the bay view and a deep breath of sea air while Tiny did his calling-in. I fully expected Tiny to suggest a cup of coffee at Oma's so we could play one of our little games of guess the perpetrator, a passable substitute for a game of checkers with Old Man McPeters.

I was reciting the verse from John Keats' Endymion to myself -- Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory -- one of the few verses I know, when Gomez strolled over to visit.

"You can tell me," I said. "What was the governor doing when he got himself killed?"

"I can't tell you anything, Fragile Dick."

Gomez wanted me to beg. "Just a tiny bit of speculation," I whined. "Something I can trade for lunch at Oma's."

"I might as well tell you," he said.

The thing I liked most about Gomez is you didn't have to beat information out of him. Usually, you didn't even have to buy him a drink.

"It's this way, Fragile Dick. We've got nothing."

"I owe you one."

"Nothing but speculation," Gomez expounded in response to my expression of gratitude. "You know his reputation. The governor was out tom-catting last night."

"So I've heard," I said. Sally Solana, my most recent ex-friend and the current state attorney general, was a Moreno staffer until she had enough on him to convince him to give her a real job. From time to time, Sally shared with me some of the sordid facts she picked up in her work, Moreno's habits included.

"Nobody thought anything about his outing from the Mansion until he didn't show up for his seven a.m. staff meeting. Then they started looking for him."

"Really?"

"There's a car that trails Moreno's limo," Gomez continued, "manned by two sharpshooters state cops. The limo driver's also a state cop, which gives the governor three body guards with him at all times. For some reason, that didn't happen last night. Seems this backup car had mechanical trouble. By the time they switched vehicles, the governor was out of sight. Cramer is grilling the two cops now."

"Which two?" I asked.

"Last names was all I got," Gomez said. "Block and Sartin. Bet their heads are going to --"

"Bill, the Chief wants you to give a statement," Tiny yelled, interrupting Gomez just as he was getting to the good part.

I'd heard something recently about Stan Cramer, head of the state police. But with my still pounding head, I couldn't remember what, something Sally had insisted on sharing while I watched a ball game on TV. I'd filed it away in the gray matter, so I'd be ready for one of her you're-not-listening-to-me pop quizzes. The question was, what category? Work stuff? State secrets stuff? Can you believe cops stuff? It would come to me.

"Bill, you hear me?" Tiny yelled again.

"Why me?" I yelled back. "I didn't see anything until I saw you guys down here destroying evidence. I can give him that statement over the car radio if he wants."

"Don't get smart with me, Bill," Tiny growled. "One of these days, you're going to push me too far."

Tiny Sanders outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and he was almost a head taller than my six-three. That didn't scare me. Tiny was too good-natured to scare anyone. He was like having a big teddy bear for a cop. If you could keep him from grinning, his size did a darn good job of scaring the tourists into good driving habits. The rest of us liked him too well to misbehave much.

Tiny was one of only two guys I had gone through school with who never called me Fragile Dick. Fred McPeters, of Fred's Fine Seafood Bar and Grill and Fred's Fine Liquors, was the other. Which, to my way of thinking, proved Tiny loved me like a brother like Fred did. Tiny ought to. I was the one who explained the facts of life when we were eight and got him his first date in high school. If Mary Louise hadn't seen the potential in him back then, Tiny probably never would have married. Heck, if Mary Louise hadn't seen the potential in him, he never would have had sex. He was just that aggressive.

"Don't shout at me, Tiny. I'm a little under the weather." I rubbed my head where it hurt the worst, between the eyes.

"Damn it, Bill. When are you going to get your act together? You had more going for you than any of us. Look how you've turned out."

"I turned out just fine," I said. "I'm a has-been, not a never-was. I'm on sabbatical from life. Early retirement, if you will."

"Sure. I bet Davy is real proud of his daddy these days. Now, wait for me in the cruiser. I need to talk to Gomez."

"I don't mind listening to you talk to Gomez," I said, deflated, rightly chastised by Tiny's remark. I looked away to my favorite view of the bay. Tiny had hit me where it hurt. My son was the only good thing I had produced in my entire life. I hoped Davy would forgive me for taking time off from being an adult.

"I don't have time for your crap today," Tiny said in a tone that almost made me think he didn't love me anymore. That bothered me, too. I was running out of people who cared.

"Get in the cruiser, Bill," he ordered, throwing me the keys. "Listen to the radio or something."

I got in the front seat, shotgun side, put the key in the ignition and turned it far enough to get the radio playing. Then I pushed buttons until I found the local station that played Peter, Paul and Mary, and other fine musical artists from my youth. I turned the radio off when I heard their plea for money to support the arts. That is, their plea for money to support the odd-ball tastes of people like me who can't handle new-age rock and roll and need to get over it and the station workers, a group of long-haired, tongue-lip-ear-eyebrow-nipple pierced graduate students who ran the station out of their camper most sunny weekends. I was afraid that if I gave them any money they'd use it to pierce as yet unrevealed parts of their anatomies. As much as I love "Puff," I didn't want that on my conscience.

With nothing else to do, I lowered the windows to catch the breeze, hoping to overhear Tiny and Gomez, and lowered my seat back as far as I could with the cage in place to pretend I was taking a nap and wasn't interested in their conversation. Surf noises prevented much snooping.

Before I got bored enough to push the button for the siren, the Center City Channel 12 Eyewitness News van arrived. Out jumped their babe reporter, Pam Somebody, and a cameraman with a long greasy ponytail. That's one thing you can say for being an out-of-the-way seaside town. By the time the TV news folk show up, there's little but the weather to report.

As Pam leaped around the news van gazelle-like, her high heels stuck in the sand. But nothing could keep Wonder Reporter Pam from her story. She slipped out of the shoes and vaulted the rest of the distance in her stocking feet.

"Officer? Officer? What happened here this morning?" Pam shouted. "We've learned that a body, reported to be Governor Moreno, was discovered on the beach. What can you tell our viewers?"

"No comment," Tiny commented loudly. He pulled Gomez by the arm to the cruiser and pushed him into the back seat. Tiny went around the car, slid in behind the wheel, and cranked the engine.

Being a helpful person, I pushed the siren button.

Pam was quick. She stuck her head, microphone-holding right arm, and torso into the open window, draping her plasticized boobs across me as she aimed the microphone for Tiny's tonsils.

"Please, Officer, the citizens are entitled to know what the police are doing about this situation," she shouted, making my ears ring. "Are the state police and FBI involved? Who's in charge of the investigation?"

"No comment," Tiny muttered.

I decided to help Tiny. Since Pam was draped across me anyway, I pulled her into my arms and kissed her on her collagen-injected, red-tattooed lips.

She broke away sputtering.

While she was still confused, I pushed her out the window and pushed the button to raise it.

"Now's your chance, Tiny," I said, blowing a kiss at Pam who stood there with an open mouth, apparently in shock that lips had a purpose other than as an outlet for loud sounds. "It always takes women a while to get over my kisses."

"You better hope she doesn't file assault charges on you," Tiny said as he put the Chevy in gear and pulled around the Channel 12 van, not once losing traction in the sand.

I reached in my right pocket and moved the twenty over to the left pocket, promising myself I'd pay up on the rest of the bet when I got some cash.

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