Stuart Woods - Choke

“No, we were at sixty feet, which is deep enough to make a very slow ascent advisable, but I guess I was down too short a time for that to be a problem; it was sort of what divers call a bounce dive. There was a tank on the cutter, and they offered it to me, but I didn’t think I needed it.”

“Anything else you care to add?”

“No, I guess that’s about it.”

Tommy took a deep breath and blew it out. “Well, we’ve kind of got a problem here, Chuck.”

“What problem?”

“Some of your answers don’t jibe with some of Clare’s answers.”

Chuck furrowed his brow. “Such as?”

“Tell me again, how long were you in the engine room?”

“Eight, ten minutes.”

“Clare said it was more like forty-five minutes.”

Chuck’s eyes widened. “That’s ridiculous; it was a simple job, and it didn’t take anywhere near that long.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Something else: Clare says you handed Harry the red tank and her the yellow tank and chose the blue one for yourself.”

“Not true. Clare told me to use the blue tank; she said it was the guest tank!”

Tommy nodded slowly. Then he produced a plastic bag from his pocket and held it up for Chuck to see. Inside was a twelve-inch length of clear plastic pipe. “Chuck,” Tommy said, “have you ever seen this before?”

Chuck stared at the plastic pipe as if it were a poisonous reptile. “Yeah, I guess I’ve seen several thousand feet of that kind of tubing in my time. It’s used a lot on boats.”

“I don’t mean this kind of pipe in general,” Tommy said. “I mean this piece of pipe in particular.”

He didn’t at all like where this was headed. “I don’t know how to tell that piece of pipe from other pieces of the same pipe,” Chuck said. “What’s going on, Tommy?”

“Chuck, I think we’ve established that you’re pretty handy on a boat, or with anything mechanical. Would you say that’s a fair judgment?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What’s your point?”

“My point is that Harry Carras wasn’t handy at all with mechanical things, that he never did his own work on his boat, that he didn’t know how machinery worked. But you do.”

“I guess I’m a little slow, Tommy. Why don’t you just spell it out?” Chuck braced himself.

“Well, it started with the lieutenant on the Coast Guard cutter. After arriving aboard Fugitive he went below to the engine room, and he found this piece of plastic pipe on the floor, right next to the air compressor.”

“So?”

“He also didn’t find any safety wire on the hose clips securing the exhaust pipe.”

“That’s crazy; I’d put it on there less than an hour before. Safety wire doesn’t just come off by itself.”

“Never mind that; let me go on with the lieutenant’s theory.”

“What theory?”

“Listen to me, Chuck,” Tommy said. “The lieutenant thinks that this piece of tubing might have been used to join two larger pieces of hose together. Could that be?”

“Well, if they were the right diameter, you could put each end of the smaller tubing into a piece of larger tubing and extend the length a few inches.”

“Let me ask your opinion on this,” Tommy said. “Could this piece of tubing have been used to join together the exhaust hose from an engine with the intake hose of the air compressor?”

Chuck’s jaw fell, and he didn’t speak.

“Chuck? What’s your opinion of that possibility?”

Chuck swallowed hard. “You think I did that, Tommy?” he asked.

“I just want your opinion, Chuck. Could you join those two pieces of equipment together like the lieutenant thinks?”

“Yes, you could. Assuming the different hoses were the right diameters. Is that what happened, Tommy? Did somebody deliberately charge our tanks with exhaust from an engine?”

Tommy leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. “We had the air in the tanks analyzed. Two of the tanks had enough carbon monoxide in them to kill in a matter of minutes; the third tank was contaminated, too, but not enough to kill in such a short time, just enough to make whoever breathed it sick after a few minutes.”

Chuck stared at the detective. “And the third tank was the blue one, my tank?”

“That’s right, Chuck. Do you see where I’m headed here?”

Chuck nodded. “I’m afraid I do.”

“Help me out, here, Chuck; show me how you couldn’t have done this.”

“Maybe Harry was running the engine and the compressor at the same time, and the compressor intake sucked in the exhaust from the engines.”

“Nice try, but the exhaust pipes are on the stern of the boat, and the intake for the compressor is around on the starboard side, well away from the exhaust.”

“I was only below for ten minutes,” Chuck replied. “That wasn’t enough time to connect the engine to the compressor and fill the three tanks.”

“The lady says you were below for forty-five minutes.”

“That’s not true, but even if it were, the engines weren’t running.”

Tommy raised a finger. “Good point. I need some more points like that, Chuck. How long would it take to fill three tanks like that?”

“I don’t know, without knowing the output of the compressor. Certainly it was smaller than the ones you’d see at a dive shop, where they’re filling dozens of tanks a day.”

Tommy turned to Daryl. “Make a note of that; I want to know the output of Carras’s compressor and how long it would take to fill three tanks.” Tommy then turned and pointed to the marina across the bight. “Chuck, how far do you figure it is from here to Fugitive’s berth over there?”

“I don’t know, maybe a hundred and fifty yards.”

“You a good swimmer Chuck? Could you swim over there, at night maybe, and fill those tanks?”

“I’d have to start Fugitive ’s engines to do that,” Chuck replied. “That would get noticed at night. Security’s pretty good over there.”

“Another good point,” Tommy said. “Keep ‘em coming.”

“All I can do is tell you the truth, Tommy.”

“So far you haven’t told me the whole truth, have you, Chuck?”

“What do you mean?”

“When the three of you were cruising out to that wreck, what did you and Clare Carras talk about?”

“I’ve told you.”

“Yeah, but Clare has told us something different.”

“Told you what?”

“Chuck, how long has the affair been going on?”

Chuck looked back and forth at the two detectives. “What did Clare say we talked about?”

“She said she told you she was breaking it off, that she loved Harry, and that even though he was impotent, she didn’t want to leave him for you.” Tommy leaned forward. “Is that your recollection, Chuck?”

Chuck sighed. “Just the opposite, Tommy. I told her I was breaking it off.”

“How long had it been going on?”

“Almost from the moment I met her,” Chuck replied.

“How often were you seeing her?”

“Two or three times a week; whenever Harry was out of town on business.”

“Did you take her up to Little Palm Island, so you could spend a whole night with her?”

“She invited me. I’d never even heard of the place. I met her up there, and we spent the one night together.”

“Why did you want to break it off with Clare?”

“Because I’d met a girl I thought I could fall in love with.”

“What’s her name?”

“Meg Hailey. She lives right over there.” He turned and pointed at the empty berth. “At least, she did.”

“She lived on a boat?”

“Yes.”

“So Where’s the boat?”