T. Parker - Cold Pursuit

"She can help us."

"Don't tell me that's why you're making dates."

"Only part of it."

"About this big a part, Mick." Hector pinched his fingers together and smiled. "Yeah, okay, sure. I can see why. I can definitely see why. You figure out if she was in bed with him or not?"

"Haven't asked."

"I'd want to get clear on that. If that's what she was doing to keep those gifts coming in, I won't let you get mixed up with her. Even if I have to tie you down."

"I think she's straight up, Heck."

Hector blew a faint plume of breath into the air, dug his car keys from his jeans. "Want a ride?"

"I'll walk it."

"I'm gonna make some calls on Hank Jr. I think it's kind of weird he keeps losing things. So I'll see you tomorrow. And Mick? Nobody with bullet holes in her neck is straight up."

McMichael found Dom da Rocha in the American Tunaboat Foundation building on the waterfront. The short, stout da Rocha was locking up the file cabinet in a back office when McMichael knocked on the door frame.

"Can I help ya?" Da Rocha had thin black hair, jug ears, a wide nose and thick black-framed glasses. McMichael guessed mid-seventies. Same deep, clear voice he'd overheard so easily from the attic at Libertad .

"Detective Tom McMichael. I'm in charge of Pete's case."

"Ain't that ironic?"

"I need your help."

"I'm sick of this office."

"Let's walk."

"I don't walk so good anymore. I can still drink."

"Name your place."

McMichael followed him across the parking lot to the Seafood Market. Da Rocha walked with a limp, his belly larger below the belt than above, but he moved forward with a determined momentum. McMichael wondered what it would be like to feel the cost of every step. The old fisherman was breathing hard by the time they sat down in the restaurant bar.

Da Rocha got a double vodka rocks, McMichael got a shot of tequila and a beer.

"What are your leads?" asked da Rocha.

McMichael stuck to generalities: it probably wasn't a robbery, it looked planned out, it might have been someone familiar with Pete or at least his house, most likely one guy.

"What I'm interested in," said McMichael, "is who profited from it. Pete was wealthy. A lot of people are going to get a lot of stuff."

"Yeah," said da Rocha. "The foundation, we get about two million dollars' worth of fancy houses. But I don't think any of us did it, to tell you the truth."

"No?"

Da Rocha smiled like a man with a razor in his boot. The lines were deep in his dark, weather-beaten face. "We're like a family, the foundation. We argue and fight all the time and nobody agrees on nothing. But when it comes time to get something done, we manage to get along. With Pete gone, we'll vote to sell the land you're sitting on right now. Yeah, this place and the foundation office where you found me, and this little harbor- we own the ground. Got it cheap back in 'thirty-three. Now it's worth about five, maybe seven million. Pete, he was against selling it."

"Wrong price?"

"He said he wanted to drive the price up, but that was bullshit. What Pete wanted was to build a new cannery and bring the tuna fleet back to San Diego. Which is a really dumb idea."

"How come?"

"Because the things that ran us out of business haven't gotten any better. You bring the fleet back here and open a cannery where we're sitting, you'd have to charge ten bucks a can of albacore. Labor costs here? Out of sight. Marine Mammal Protection Act and the damned porpoises? Nobody else plays by that stupid rule. And every country with a coast has got a two-hundred-mile limit now- we can't fish where we used to, soldiers board our ships and run us out at gunpoint. Foreign competition? Damned Japs undersell everybody because their government subsidizes their fleet, and that's after we subsidized it after the war. Damned Spaniards run circles around us. You tried to go back into the tuna business in San Diego, you'd get crucified."

McMichael pictured Pete Braga, seated in his trophy room, surrounded by fortune and the artifacts of a life gone by, trying to hatch a way to bring it all back home.

"Did he really believe he could do it?"

"How do you know what a man really believes? Pete, he hired this nurse. You know, mostly just to cook, keep him company. Well, he fell in love with her. Don't ask me about any details because I don't know any. But the last six months or so, Pete's hopping around like a goat, out of his head for this girl. He believes he loves her, so he loves her. He believes he can bring a dead business back to San Diego, so he tries."

McMichael sipped his tequila and looked across the harbor toward Coronado. "The foundation didn't like Pete's stand on its land here. The other port commissioners didn't like him rolling over for the new Airport Authority. Pete was surrounded by unhappy associates."

"That's right," said da Rocha. "The Port Commission, though, that's a whole different level. We're small-time here. We're a bunch of old fishermen with a good lobbyist. We own a little ground, we think about the old days too much. But the Port Commission, they got the whole waterfront. Most powerful seven people in the city. They're the big-time landlord- they got the harbor, the airport, fourteen hotels, fifty-something restaurants and businesses. They got thirty-three miles of waterfront. Miles , Detective. Every time a dollar changes hands, they get five, six percent of it. Hotel rents a room, Port Commission gets paid. Restaurant sells a drink, Port Commission gets paid. Airport, rental cars, everything- Port Commission gets paid off the top. Millions of dollars, pouring in. They got a building up on Coast Highway, hardly any windows in it. The meetings ain't open to nobody. They make a deal, it's a secret, too. They want to do something, you find out about it after it's done. You make enemies on the Port Commission like Pete did, look out."

"And Pete wanted to give away control over Lindbergh," said McMichael.

Da Rocha smiled. "Pete never gave anything away in his life."

"What would he get out of it?"

"How would I know? He didn't talk to me about stuff like that. Us foundation guys, we were small-time to Pete. I think we just reminded him of who he used to be."

Da Rocha drank, frowned. "See, Pete kind of sold us out."

McMichael studied Dom da Rocha's sun-toughened face, saw the dreamy backwash of memory come into his eyes.

"Pete was a captain by the time the war broke out- only twenty-three years old, but he knew fish and he knew clippers. That was back when they were using bamboo poles and barbless hooks. The hard part was finding the fish. No sonar or spotter planes or anything like that. So you'd cruise the ocean for weeks or months sometimes, looking for birds or a bait-fish boil or the best was a log or a little piece of driftwood. Because on the driftwood there'd be a few little crabs, and just under the crabs would be some anchovies or sardines trying to eat them, and under the bait-fish you'd have a school of mackerel or smelt and under that you'd have the bonito and under them you'd have the skipjack and the tuna. It was like a big triangle reaching down into the water, with the driftwood being the point at the top and the big tuna way down at the bottom. You found a log, everybody started gearing up to hit the racks. You could chum through with live bait, get the mackerel hopping and the bonito working, get them into a real frenzy until the tuna came up, the whole bottom of the triangle, and they'd go crazy, hitting hooks with no bait on 'em. Pretty soon you got thirty-pounders coming up, then hundred-pounders. Then the cows would come screaming up out of the depths and you'd have three, four, maybe five guys on one pole with a swivel and you'd have to get a rhythm or you'd break them off, you'd lose them if you weren't working as a team. And you'd pole this three- or four-hundred-pound tuna fish out of the water and into the boat behind you. Just about break your back, and if the fish hit you it would break your arms and your ribs, maybe your skull. Young Danny Hudson got his brains scrambled forever by a three-hundred-pound fish, didn't duck in time. Those cows would jump into the sky and come screamin' past your head and I don't know if you've ever touched a live tuna fish but they're one of the hardest things God ever made, just pure muscle with something like electricity running through them, the scientists spent years trying to figure out what made a tuna fish the strongest living thing and they still don't know. They're like rocks with lightning running through them, they can do fifty miles an hour underwater, think about that a second, you ever get a chance to catch one you'll know exactly what I mean. And all the way down the boat, you got teams of guys down in the rack, hauling up tons and tons of big fish. Four, eight, ten hours straight. You had a good trip, your boat sat lower in the water. Took you forever to get home. There was nothing like it."