From the beach, the carnival lights took on a sad, hopeless appearance. They were insignificant when compared with the dark surging body of water churning and crashing and whispering some forty yards away. There was just enough light to make out the water’s movement but little else. The spot at which the ocean ended and the sky began was lost to the darkness.
My shoes slid on the sand and sank, and I could feel wet grains pour in around the sides of my feet. I hobbled awkwardly around the stairs with the grit weighing me down. The wind from the shore chilled me.
On the beach side, there was no wooden lattice blocking entry to the black space under the boardwalk. I got my penlight out and used it to paint the space between two support beams right in front of me. It allowed me to see only about six inches ahead. But the ground was more even there, and there was enough room to stand up without crouching. I walked forward slowly, my light pointed down with an occasional sweep upwards to be sure I wasn’t about to knock my head against a support. I didn’t know what I expected to find. The sand was littered with empty cans, crumpled newsprint, and candy bar wrappers, along with shells, rocks, and some scrub brush. There were also empty paper envelopes, discarded needles, and plenty of cigarette butts, showing that the spot under the boardwalk where Renaldo sold was a popular place for those of his customers who couldn’t wait to get indoors for their fix.
I walked straight back until I was at the lattice that separated me from the street. Renaldo was standing on the other side, leaning against the stairwell, smoking a cigarette. The syrupy flavor of the smoke told me it wasn’t tobacco he was smoking. I played my flash on the ground in either direction, but there was nothing to see. I was searching just to be doing something, to convince myself that I wasn’t entirely useless. I’d do better at home in bed. My head hadn’t touched a pillow in nearly forty-eight hours. My little nap courtesy of Mitch hardly counted.
I picked my way back towards the beach. The debris crackled under my feet and my shoes now felt as though they weighed an extra two pounds each. I had veered off to the right in the dark, and was coming out under the stairs. I started to correct my path when the edge of my penlight beam caught the scuffed sole of a man’s shoe. That didn’t surprise me. It was just one more thing that might get discarded under the boardwalk. But then I traced my flash up a little more and saw that the shoe was still attached to a leg. It was attached to a leg wearing familiar pale blue suit pants. I crouched as the stairs came down above me and my penlight lit up the pile that was wedged under them. A man could have decided it was an out of the way place to spend the night. He probably wouldn’t sleep face down though.
I knew who it was but I had to make sure. I lifted his head by the hair enough to see his face. It was a pretty face, a strange, half-grown, boyish face. Mr. Greg Taylor was never going to fight with Stark again. He was never going to fight with anybody.
I let his head drop, hiding the face back in the sand, and I felt my way along his body, training the flash on my hand. There was nothing in his pants pockets and he didn’t have any others. He could have been robbed, but it was just as likely that he had had nothing in his pockets in the first place. His was a nameless body and would have remained such if found by someone who didn’t know him. That would have set the police back days and whoever did it would have plenty of time to distance himself from the crime. Assuming there was a crime, and he hadn’t died of a self-inflicted overdose. Even then, his companion, John or Tim or Tom, would want to have been somewhere else when it happened. Especially if “John” was John Stark and this whole case was a preemptive ruse.
I came out from under the boardwalk and stretched in the open air. I made my way back up the stairs, pushing away the idea of what was underneath, and then crossed the deserted boardwalk and came down the other set of stairs to the street. At the bottom, I leaned against the railing and emptied first one shoe and then the other, adding my share to a little mound of sand where other people had done the same. I walked back around to Renaldo. Rusty was long gone.
“You have anything else to add to the noises you heard last night?”
“Just noises, peeper,” Renaldo said and let out a laugh filled with smoke.
I looked back along the street to Seaside and the block beyond. This was a commercial district. It probably closed up at six o’clock just when the boardwalk was starting to draw business away for the night. “There a phone nearby?” I said.
“At the end of the block. Who do you need to call?”
I looked at him. “Let’s just say you might not want to hang around here to find out.”
He straightened up. “Why do you want to do that?”
“Take a peek under those stairs on the other side of the boardwalk and you’ll see.”
He spat a word that conveyed the full range of his feelings.
“I’ll leave you out of it by name,” I said, “but I can’t promise to leave you out completely. I guess the police will still know who I mean.”
He spat the word again, and then said, “I hate junkies,” only he included the adjectival version of his new favorite word there too.
“Don’t worry too much. The police won’t be too happy to see me again either.”
He nodded ruefully. “You too, huh? You too.”
We turned to go then, and walked the half-block together without speaking. At the corner, Renaldo pointed out the phone in silence, and then turned north on Seaside and walked briskly away.
The phone booth was wood without a door. The inside surface had been carved with any number of names, initials, suggestions, and complaints. I picked up the receiver and dialed a number. I ran my hand over the booth’s wall, feeling the scrape of the cut words.
A voice came on the line. I was surprised that it didn’t sound sleepy. In this deserted part of town it felt like the dead of night.
“Mr. Stark, please,” I said.
“Mr. Stark is no longer receiving calls this evening,” the voice said. It was the butler who had opened the door that morning, a lifetime ago.
“Tell him it’s Dennis Foster about Greg Taylor,” I said.
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the voice said, “Please hold the wire.”
I held the wire.
“You found him,” Stark’s famous voice said after several minutes. There was the sound of another extension being hung up. “I knew you were good. I have a sense for these things.”
“You may not think so when you hear the rest of it.”
A note of caution entered the baritone. “Go on.”
“He’s dead.”
A sharp intake of breath sounded over the line. There was a moment in which he collected himself, preparing before going on. When he spoke, his voice had lost its usual tone of command, but there was nothing else to indicate that he was upset. “What happened?”
I told him. I left out that Greg had been seen with another man.
There was a pause. At last, “Did he suffer?”
“I’m not a doctor, but it didn’t look like it.”
“Good,” he said.
“I need to call it in, and I want to know what you’d like me to say. I’m down in Harbor City and the police are going to want to know why.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Where were you last night?”
“Home. Why?”
“Anybody with you? Was anyone else in the house last night?”
“My butler was in. I asked him for some coffee at, I don’t know, ten o’clock, maybe later. The maids were in also. They’d all vouch for me. But why does that matter? Wasn’t it the drugs? We’d fought about that so many times; Greg always promised to quit.” His voice had grown tight and risen half an octave. “Damn him. It was an overdose, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you think I’m a suspect?”
“No, but the police are going to. Did Greg know Mandy Ehrhardt?”
“They might have met once or twice. Why? Does this have anything to do with that?”
“No. I can’t see how it does. I’m just thinking of ways to leave you out and I don’t see any.”
“That’s all right. You do what you have to. The police have always been kind to me before.”
“These aren’t S.A. cops. They’re Harbor City cops. They don’t tend to be kind to anybody. You told me Greg was on your payroll. Was he really or was that just a story?”
“He is. He was. He always claimed he didn’t like it, that it made him feel like a kept man. I always thought it was a good precaution.”
“It was. People will guess the truth, there’s no avoiding that, but it should mean that everyone keeps to the story officially at least. I can’t speak for Parsons and Hopper.”
“I can’t worry about that,” he said. He paused. “Thank you. For finding him.”
“I’ll call tomorrow if I know any more. The police may be there tonight. This phone call never happened. They don’t like me very much already. I don’t need to give them another excuse. Your butler...?”
“Nothing to worry about,” he said without any hesitation.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I said, and hung up. I picked up the phone again and called the police.