"I don't know. He never said."
"Ever mention his name?"
"I don't think he knew it."
"Physical description?"
Maggie shook her head. "Big and drunk is all he said."
I sipped some lukewarm tea and realized that I had a headache. It was too soon for a hangover, so I concluded it was just plain overload. Scotch, foreplay, wet underwear ... Two dead guys, a presumptive nympho whom I did not crave, a demure yoga teacher whom I did. And now clues. It was a lot for one evening. "How long ago was this?" I soldiered on. Maggie thought a moment. "Three months or so. It was January."
I rubbed my temples. "Ten grand would have gone a long way toward fixing up his boat."
"If he believed he'd really get it," Maggie said. "The whole thing could've been a setup. Lure him with the money, kill him anyway."
I thought back to my one meeting with Kenny Lukens. He was jumpy, all right. Thought he was being followed. Offered me way too good a deal to fetch a pail and shovel and dig the pouches up for him. Or get strangled in his place. "So he passed the setup on to me."
Maggie bit her lip and looked away. "I knew you'd think that. That's partly why I didn't want to tell you. Or even admit to myself that maybe that's what Kenny did. I mean, he lied, he stole— but I don't think he would've knowingly put someone else in danger."
I thought that over, and managed not to take it personally. On paper, at least, I was a private eye. And that's what private eyes did, right? Stood as surrogates for people getting clobbered, threw themselves in front of the onrushing trains of other people's screw-ups and calamities. Defended and avenged . . . Me? It would have been unseemly to start simpering about it, but Jesus, what a crappy line of work.
Not without dread, I said, "Is there anything else you'd like to tell me?"
She shook her head and took a breath that didn't come in quite as smoothly as her others. In a soft voice that would have melted tundra, she said, "You still mad at me?"
I didn't answer right away. I couldn't. Not that I had to think very hard about the question. Rather, I had to choke back a reply that was exorbitant, sophomoric, absurd, and dangerous. I had to stop myself from staring into her serene gray eyes and saying that not only was I not angry with her, but that I longed to be her hero. "I'm not mad," I said at last.
I badly wanted to make love to her then, and understood I couldn't. With my preposterous damp shorts and the residue of Lydia still clinging to me, it would have been a desecration. I sighed, and said that I should go.
Maggie didn't beg me to stay. But when I'd risen and was moving, sideways and reluctantly, toward the stairs that were the only exit, she floated up and kissed me quickly on the cheek. I didn't see it coming and I still don't know exactly how she closed the distance between us so smoothly and so silently, and with such precision that nothing touched except her lips brushing light and cool against my face.
I felt their outline as I climbed up to the cockpit then down the rope ladder in the warm and slightly misty night.
14
I've said it before, I'll say it again: I should have gone home. I intended to go home. I was already on my bike and pointing it toward home.
So why didn't I go home?
Near as I can guess, it was some crazy mix of chivalry, testosterone, and simple curiosity. I was wired from lack of food, and sex thwarted by compunction. I wanted Maggie to be proud of me, impressed with my involvement; I wanted to have some accomplishment or at least adventure to lay at her feet.
And Kenny Lukens' boat, the boat where Andrus the happy Latvian had been murdered just two nights before, was right there in my face, fifty, sixty yards away. It was ringed with yellow tape strung between police stanchions but was otherwise unguarded. How could I leave without sneaking aboard and checking it out?
I rolled my bike up closer to Dream Chaser. I took a moment to look around. The boatyard was dim and had grown quiet; the few people still at large seemed lost in conversations or millings of their own. I put the bike up on its kickstand and slipped beneath the crime-scene tape, my sneakers crunching on the limestone gravel.
My heart raced as I stood inside the closed-off circle. Real PI's, of course, commit small illegalities all the time, big illegalities now and then. They do so in the honorable confidence that justice lies beyond the law and ranks a million miles above it. Who could disagree? But I have a horror of doing anything unlawful. Far from being proud of this, I think it shows a want of character. The citizen as chicken, still like a quailing high school student, fearing the indelible black mark that will somehow blot his future. What I have felt is a wimpy obedience that justifies the shirking of anything beyond obedience.