Billingsgate Shoal da-1 Read online

  I called the number. A musical voice oozing forced cheerfulness answered. It was the Holiday Inn. Stunned, I asked for Wallace Kinchloe. He wasn't registered. Was he ever registered there? They wouldn't say. I returned to Ruggles's office.

  "Guess what?" I asked him.

  "I already know. It's the downtown Holiday Inn. I just remembered."

  "He isn't there either. Is there anything else on the documentation? How about a post office box?"

  "Nothing. Tell me the story again."

  So I did. Lieutenant Commander Ruggles continued to stroke his chin thoughtfully.

  "According to this, Wallace Kinchloe was born in Danbury, Connecticut, August 4, 1913. He resided in Cohasset until a little over two years ago. Now he is listing his address as temporary, which fits with the Holiday Inn. Under remarks are two words: in transit.

  "In transit?"

  " 'In transit.' Not much to go on. Here's more though; the boatbuilder who built Penelope is required by law to fill out one of these."

  He waved a small square of paper at me. It had a fancy engraved border, two signatures, and some sort of. government seal. Very official.

  "This is a Master Carpenter's Certificate, which states that such-and-such a vessel actually was constructed at such-and-such a time and that delivery of said vessel actually took place at a certain time by a certain party. OK?"

  "Of course. Like a title to ea car."

  "Uh, no. The title is the Documentation Certificate that we've already looked at. This certificate actually corresponds more closely to the certificate of origin of a car, telling who made it where."

  "Gotcha."

  "Thing is. Thing is this: sometimes people fake them."

  "Why?"

  "Well think about it awhile. Sometimes it's advantageous to make a boat vanish or appear. Suppose a fisherman's down on his luck, and how many aren't these days? He's got a boat that's losing money and can't keep up the payments. The boat is a dead duck. So he hauls it someplace where it can be altered, mostly in the superstructure-you know, cabins, wheelhouse, anything but the hull, which stays. Metal boats are better because. they can be made to look new more easily.. ."

  I had settled back into my chair like dandelion fluff on a doormat. I was all ears.

  "He gets a boatbuilder to do the alteration. Fine. Then the big thing: he pays the boatbuilder to put his name to one of these-"

  He waved the Master Carpenter's Certificate at me again.

  "Now let's return to our fisherman friend who's broke. 'What's happened to your boat?' people ask. 'Sunk,' he says, and files a big fat insurance claim. How can anyone dispute him? We can't find a trace of it. A lot of claims say the boat was stolen, not sunk. But the net result is of course the same. What happens? Six weeks later a 'new' boat emerges from the boatyard, with a new name and documentation number.

  But of course it's really the old boat on which the fisherman has now collected his insurance coverage and paid off the mortgage, and given the builder a sizeable chunk too. The results: a free boat. No more debts."

  "Ah hah! Very clever."

  "Ah yes. But remember: just as the owner has defied the law, the boatbuilder who does the alteration and deliberately falsifies a carpenter's certificate has his head in the noose too. Maybe more so, because if caught in perjury-which this is-he cannot ply his trade any longer. He is in what fishermen call 'deep shit.' "

  I walked over to the window and looked down at the cars crawling along toward the North End. Behind them was Boston Harbor. In the far distance, through the bluish-gray haze, I could see tiny specks of fishing boats returning. They each trailed a white-gray thread of wake.

  "The Penelope was built in Gloucester by Murdock's boatyard, Daniel Murdock, owner. Here's his signature."

  I looked at the small square of paper and copied down the name.

  "All I want to do is talk with Kinchloe for a few seconds," I said. "It's so frustrating to be unable to reach him."

  ' "He might be living aboard his boat. That could explain the in transit."

  "I bet that's it. So how do I-locate the boat'?"

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  "Hang around the harbors. Talk to the harbormasters and other fishermen and boaters. I don't know. We can't help."

  "I'm wondering if he has a post office box."

  "They won't tell you; that's confidential. You may inquire about a company but not an individual?

  "I've got a way to find out. My brother-in-law's a cop."

  "Ahhh. Let me know if you uncover anything interesting, OK?"

  "Sure will. And, Mr. Ruggles, thanks a lot."

  "My job; don't mention it. Buzz me anytime you have a question."

  I left the building and headed home. The more I pursued the green boat and her owner the stranger it appeared. Then I remembered I had photographs of her, and of somebody on board. The developed negatives were hanging in the dustproof cabinet in my darkroom. When I arrived I took out the long strips of film, cut them into convenient lengths, and ran a contact sheet. I examined the tiny pictures, just slightly bigger than postage stamps, with a loupe. I had taken six shots of the boat as we had passed it. I selected two shots of the boat and enlarged them. One shot was a side view directly I off her beam, the other a view of her stem off her starboard quarter.

  There was another shot that looked interesting. It was of one of the crewmen, or perhaps Kinchloe himself, that I had I snapped with the telephoto lens. I enlarged this negative as much as possible so that his head almost filled the 8 x 11 inch paper. The tiny speck on the celluloid was blown up perhaps fifty times its original size, which resulted in a portrait that was so grainy it was impressionistic. It was as if Georges Seurat had painted the portrait. Nevertheless, it sufficed. The man wore a faint dark beard, had thinning hair, a prominent and handsome nose, and two whitish specks that were interesting. One was a white line around his neck, directly under the Adam's apple. It was probably a choker necklace, made of puka shells. Somehow, it didn't seem to fit on a middle-aged man in New England, as out of place as a walrus in Death Valley.

  The other speck was in the middle of his right ear. It was scarcely noticeable, but it was there. If the man were not deeply tanned, perhaps I would have missed it altogether. He wore a hearing aid.

  I looked again at the neck. Thick neck. Prominent Adam's apple. The man was strong-heavily muscled and fit. A thick neck with heavy jowls means fat. It is often associated with heavy drinking. But thick necks with clean chins and bulging Adam's apples tell a different story: muscle in abundance; no fat.

  This man, whoever he was, was a curious collection of contradictions. The thinning hair and hearing aid clearly told me he was middle-aged. Perhaps we were contemporaries at forty-seven-maybe he was a bit older. Still he wasn't ancient. Why would he be deaf? Then I thought of a logical reason: perhaps he was a diver. The hallmark of the scuba diver is broken eardrums.

  The beard, "surfer" necklace, and extraordinary fitness all bespoke a man who's trying his damndest to look younger. I have a special sympathy for those people, being one myself. But the picture had a strange quality to it. The man resembled one of the yachting crowd; he certainly seemed out of place aboard a trawler. Then I remembered Ruggles telling me the boat was noncommercial. Yet she didn't even faintly resemble a pleasure craft.

  I took the pictures into the living room and showed them to Mary, who was reading a book on Chinese porcelains.

  "See what I mean? See that dark line inside the hull?"

  "You mean this, the line that's slanting'?"

  "Yeah. That is left by oil slick and dirty bilge water. Look how high up it is. I'd say it's a wonder she made it into Wellfleet. She was close to going down, even with her pumps working."

  "Is this the man we saw'? He looks kind of neat. He looks like a pirate or something."

  "He does at that. And he's elusive too. Your brother is going to help me, I hope."

  Detective Lieutenant Joseph Brindelli wanted to know w
hy. I explained, and he reluctantly agreed to see about the PO box. He called back ten minutes later with the news that Wallace Kinchloe did indeed have a post office box at the main Boston office.

  "It's number twenty-three nineteen, but you can't get into it you know."

  "Sure I know, I just want to drop him a line."

  And I did, asking him if he had seen a scuba diver in the harbor when he had his boat repaired. I had the postcard in my hand and was just about to drop it in the mail when I reconsidered. According to official records Penelope was a new boat. Brand-new. And yet, thinking back on my photographs, I wouldn't have described the boat as new. It wasn't old and beat-up, true… but new would not be the first word that would pop into my head if I were asked to describe her. I followed a hunch and called Reliable Marine Service in Wellfleet. The raspy 'voice on the other end told me I had the old man on the line. I asked for Sonny and in ten seconds was speaking to him. His voice was deep and hollow, and I pictured him in my mind's eye as big and fat.

  "Do you remember a green fishing boat you welded a patch onto earlier in the week?"

  "Sure. Who you?"

  "I'm a guy trying to find the owner. Listen: would you say, judging from what you saw of the boat, that she was new?"

  "New'? How new?"

  "Brand-new."

  "Naw! She's six to eight years old at least. Tell by the steel. Maybe older. Somebody's yanking your chain, buddy."

  "Thank you. Bye."

  "Mary," I said that evening as I poured her glass of wine, "there's something fishy about that fishing boat. And it doesn't make me any more eager to have to visit Sarah Hart.”

  To make matters worse, Mary got a phone call later in the evening and informed me that she had to fill in at the hospital for Irene Hamilton who'd called in sick. This meant I was to drive down to The Breakers alone and comfort Sarah. It was not a cheery prospect, and one would almost suspect that Mary was trying to get out of it were it not for the fact that she has seen more death and done more comforting and grief therapy than an army chaplain at Verdun.

  So the next day found me trundling down to the Cape again in the Audi. Just before noon I cruised to a stop in front of the Hart house in Eastham. Sarah's car was there. Damn it. People face death, and think about it differently. I have a hard time with it. I didn't realize this fully until I left medical school and began to practice. I suppose I had always assumed that I was in medicine to conquer death, which is of course impossible. Ultimately every doctor must lose all his patients. It was this difficulty that eventually caused me to leave medicine and go into dentistry, and then-I suppose in retrospect-a sort of compromise in the middle: oral surgery. It was just about the time my third patient died that I began to seriously reconsider medicine as my life's work. -

  And it was after my third patient's death, as we drew up the sheet and I felt the poisonous stares of his parents, that I knew I was going to leave. The boy was Peter Brindelli, aged eight. My nephew.

  I walked up to Sarah's door and rang the bell. I

  Grief is its own anesthetic. Thank God for that at least. Allan Hart's mother, like so many grief-crazed parents I had seen, was in that state between shock and. total surrender to the paralysis of grief. As such, her behavior was surreal, as if she were marking time before the axe was to fall. I remember clasping her elbow, the slip and slickness of the black silk blouse alive in my hand. She gazed up politely into my face. But her eyes had no life. Those pretty Irish eyes (and she had to be Irish; the black hair, cream skin, and light blue eyes confirmed it) stared at. me, looking right past me.

  "It's so thoughtful of you to have come," she lilted. "It's so comforting when-"

  But then she bit her lip quickly, to stop from shaking. Bit it till the blood came, and rushed over to the window, looking out. She stood there blinking and wincing for a while. Then I saw her hands move quickly, flash down into the window panes, and I ran to her. I grabbed her wrists hard, but not before she'd done the windows-not to mention her hands-a lot of damage.

  ***

  Mary pulled up to the cottage at quarter to five, having finished her shift at three. She still wore her uniform. She found me out on the deck gazing off over the ocean. In my right paw was a gin and tonic big enough to float the Queen Mary.

  "Hi, Charlie!"

  "Mary, I have just had one of the most harrowing days in recent memory. I'm trying to put it back into the box and nail the top down so it'll quit leaping out at me."

  I told, her about my grim session with Sarah Hart. How I'd washed her bloody hands and wrists in hot soapy water and she hadn't even flinched. Not even when I smeared the cuts with tincture of iodine. How I had confided in her about my guilt feelings, and explained exactly what happened in the harbor. How she'd listened passively as I told her, as if there was too much grief for doubt or hate to enter her mind.

  "She finally let it go after I was there about twenty minutes," I told Mary. "It was like a seizure. She screamed and clung to me, digging her nails in. She, rolled her eyes and seemed to talk in tongues."

  "I've seen it many, many times, Charlie. I can never get used to it. It kills people you know. The grief and depression can kill, sending people rushing after those who've died. And she's a widow too."

  "She told me Allan was a very good diver. There's no reason to think he'd get into trouble, especially in the harbor."

  "Does she have any relatives?" '

  "Yes. She's flying to Pasadena day after tomorrow to visit her sister for a week or two."

  "Thank heaven for that at least."

  I grabbed a hiking staff and walked out onto the flats, following the ebbing tide. It can be an unsettling feeling going out there with nothing with you. It's hard to explain. It's being too alone. I feel much better with other people, or just an object like a cane or staff to take with me. Far out there I looked back toward shore. Squinting, I could just barely see the tiny gray square speck of The Breakers that jutted up over the low horizon. Squinting still more, I could see a very faint motion above it. The American flag. Then I pictured myself on the deck of the grounded trawler with 7x50 marine binoculars a mile and a half farther out, on Billingsgate. I could see plenty of The Breakers then. Plenty. Especially if the owner happened to be prancing around on deck waving a gaudy beach umbrella trying to get my attention. I could see him just fine. Had they seen me? Did they remember me? Did it matter? There were a lot of unanswered questions, and I didn't like any of them. I walked around awhile, then went back to the beach at a slow jog. I took a sauna with Mary and then a cold shower. During all these maneuvers it was a constant hassle trying to keep my cast dry. We changed into beachy things and ambled out onto the deck and watched the tide move out, slow puddles of water-sheen beginning to leave the lower pockets of the flats.

  Distant gulls cried, a faint plaintive eeeyonk, eyonk, yonk-yank-yank. The groaner buoy bleeped. The dune grass hissed, gray-green as it bent to the wind. It would have been a lovely evening under ordinary circumstances.

  "Charlie, the water's ready. Time to put them in."

  She had stopped at the lobster pool and bought two gigantic specimens for dinner, no doubt to cheer me up. But it didn't.

  The thought of the two big crustaceans scurrying and crawling their way into oblivion in the scalding water did not appeal to me at all. As one who worked on people's teeth and I mouths I was acutely aware of pain. If death must be done, then best do it quickly, cleanly, with the proper equipment. I fetched an ice pick from the back entry and then took the lobsters from the refrigerator. I grabbed them by their middles; they flung their arms out and backward in a futile attempt to take my hands off. Their big claws were immobilized by the pegs and thick rubber bands, and I was glad. I inserted the steel point quickly and forcefully down between each animal's head and thorax. It made a noise like a stapler. They didn't say or do a damn thing; when I picked them up their bodies dangled like latex. I dropped the limp corpses into the boiling water and put the butter on to melt. The
dinner helped some; we sat outside and watched the sun go down. It hit bottom just when the bottle of chablis did.

  ***

  The next morning at eleven they buried Allan Hart. The funeral was bad enough, but to watch Jack and five other young men carry the casket down the church aisle and out of the hearse to the grave was unbearable. It was that first shovelful of dirt that got me, and his mother. She wept openly, I silently, with little convulsive shudders and throat squeals.

  My fault… my fault…

  We had Sarah and the rest over to the cottage afterward. Extremely glum. Boy was I glad when it was over. Then I sat and stared out across the water for the rest of the day. Life is boring and death is terrifying. And here we are dangling on spider silk, caught right in the middle.

  The next day Mary went to a local art fair. When she returned we sat at the kitchen table eating two small chef salads. She had brought a copy of the Globe with her that somebody had left behind at the fair. She flipped through it absently, and I saw a picture flash by that I wanted to retrieve. I found it. It was a picture of a boat. White and low-slung with a small cabin, it was a lobster boat. I read the story. The boat, out of Marblehead, had disappeared almost two weeks ago. It did not look good for the skipper, a certain Andrew D'Corzo.

  The article had set me to thinking. I had planned to make contact with Daniel Murdock, the boatbuilder who had signed the carpenter's certificate, as soon as I returned to Concord. But I remembered what Lieutenant Ruggles had told me in his office about vessels appearing and disappearing. Perhaps I should look for a boat that had recently disappeared and would roughly fit the dimensions of Penelope. If indeed the boat I saw wasn't new, then she had to have a previous life: What better way to discover it than to check on boats recently lost?

  "How's the wrist?" asked Mary.

  "Still hurts. And I can't drive golf balls. I can't beat you at tennis. I can't swim. I can't practice my trade except to remove stitches from previous extractions?