57
The buoys clanged as the waves slapped hard against the pier. Gulls were circling in mad sweeps through the dark gray sky. The air was warm and humid. The papers in Joe’s hands were curling from the moisture in the air, so he thrust them into his jacket pocket and continued on down the pier.
He scanned the line of boats off to his right. Leather-faced sailors were mooring them tightly to the pier. A few boats had been taken out of the water and were secured to metal contraptions. The pier was abuzz with activity, with a sense of urgency. The weather forecasters were calling the hurricane “Caroline,” and she was said to be a doozy.
Joe scanned the names of the boats, looking for the one that had been written on his paper. These captains sure could get creative. The Codfather. Boobie Bouncer. Marlin Monroe. Aquaholic. Joe smiled. The name he was looking for was simpler. The Kathleen Marie. He spotted it finally, close to the end of the pier. As he hoped, a man was tying her up.
“Ahoy there,” Joe called down to the man.
The man, who appeared to be seventy but was probably younger, looked up at him. His eyes were black. His face was like snakeskin, brown and rough and scaly. Large, sandpapery hands gripped a thick stretch of rope. He didn’t smile. “Who you looking for?” he asked.
“Captain James Hogarth,” Joe said. “Is that you?”
“I don’t know anybody else by that name.”
“Wonder if I could speak with you for a minute.”
“Kind of busy, as you see. Trying to get ahead of Caroline.”
“Yeah. They say it’s going to be a big one. Some talk of evacuations from low-lying areas.”
Hogarth shrugged. “We’ve been through hurricanes before. We’ll get through this one as well.”
“I imagine we will.” Joe opened his hand to reveal his badge. “I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”
Hogarth studied him with his black eyes. “I thought I was done talking to cops.”
“Well, you never talked to me.”
The captain threw down the rope. “I’ll be up in a second.”
Joe watched him as he climbed around his boat, a surprisingly agile old man. The wind was whipping along the pier, and caught Hogarth’s long, thinning white hair, sending it flying upward, making him look for a moment like one of those toy trolls Joe remembered from his childhood. With his big, strong hands, Hogarth gripped the ladder and hauled himself up the pier. He took his time, but Joe didn’t note any resentment in the old man’s walk toward him. It was almost as if he had expected to be questioned again, and welcomed it.
“So I presume this is about the Huntingtons,” Hogarth said when he reached Joe.
“Why do you presume that?”
“Because their names are back in the news. Another murder of one of their people.” Black eyes danced under bushy white brows. “This time maybe David’s got himself caught.”
“You say that as if you think he’s guilty,” Joe observed.
“Everyone knew he’d been carrying on with that girl.”
“Did his wife know? His first wife, I mean.”
For the first time Hogarth smiled, revealing a mouthful of broken, missing teeth. “Dominique knew everything.”
“Why did your change your testimony?”
Hogarth laughed. “I thought that case was closed.”
“You originally said you hadn’t taken the boat the day Dominique was killed, then you said you did. Which is true?”
The smile disappeared from the old man’s face. “Am I going to be arrested for something?”
“Not if you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Isn’t giving false testimony a crime?”
“We have ways of overlooking that if you can give us other helpful information.”
Hogarth shook his head, as if he was disgusted by the whole conversation. He yanked out from his stained white T-shirt a small gold cross on a thin gold chain. “I believe in Jesus Christ, Detective. I believe that telling lies is a sin. That’s why I changed my testimony. Because I couldn’t live with the lies I told.” He looked back down at his boat. “She was not a good woman. But she didn’t deserve to die. No one deserves to have their life ended by someone else.”
“So you did take the yacht out that day? And Dominique was on it?”
“It’s just as I told your chief. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, and Dominique wanted to go out on the water. I took her, sir, yes I did.” Hogarth’s face clouded. “But Chief Davis wouldn’t believe me.”
“Why do you think he wouldn’t believe you?”
“Because of what else I said.”
“And that was?”
Hogarth looked at him. “Surely you know, if you’ve come to see me now.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I told him that once we were out at sea, I saw that David Huntington had come along for the ride as well. I hadn’t seen him board. Perhaps he’d already been on board, waiting for us.”
“Did you speak with him?”
“No, sir. But I heard him. I was up on the bridge, and I heard loud voices, a man and a woman. That surprised me, because I thought Dominique was the only one on board. I peered down into the cabin as I saw her with him.”
“With David.”
“Yes, with her husband.”
“Are you certain it was him? You were looking from above, and from photographs I’ve seen, the Huntington yacht was a rather large vessel. Are you sure you got a good look at him?”
“Who else could it have been? It was him. It was David Huntington.”
“Then how do you account for him being at the house, that same day?”
“I can’t account for it. Just like I can’t account for that storm that suddenly whipped up.” Hogarth gripped the cross in his hand tightly. “The sky got as black as night and the waves were so high they were coming up onto the deck. I couldn’t keep the boat steady. Within no time it was breaking apart underneath me. I called down to Dominique but she didn’t respond. It was like she wasn’t on board anymore. Like neither one of them was. They would have answered me in such a storm. The boat’s not that big. But I never saw her or him after hearing them argue.”
“What happened then?”
“The storm was raging. I figured I was a dead man, that I’d go down with the ship.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I had my life jacket on, and though I went under, I came up again and managed to grab ahold of some of the debris, and finally made it to shore. The storm ended just as quickly as it had come up. Suddenly the seas were calm again. Still, it was late before I made back it to land, and when I got there, I went straight to Huntington House to tell them what had happened.”
“Who did you tell?”
“Mrs. Hoffman, the housekeeper.”
This surprised Joe. There had been no mention of Mrs. Hoffman in the report.
“You told her that Mrs. Huntington was dead?”
“I told her that I feared the worst.”
“What was Mrs. Hoffman’s reaction?”
“She was white as a ghost, but then again, she always is.” A small smile cracked across Hogarth’s face. “She was upset, but she seemed to know already, even if she acted as if she didn’t.”
“How could she have known already? There was no Coast Guard report of a storm, and no report of a capsized boat until they found remnants of the yacht the next day.”
“You want my opinion? I think David Huntington made it back in the lifeboat and he told her.”
“Did you see him at all?”
Hogarth shook his head. “I’ve never seen him since, except on the news. Mrs. Hoffman insisted I spend the night there, since I was so wet and cold. But in the morning, she handed me an envelope and told me, since the yacht was destroyed, they wouldn’t be needing me anymore.”
“What was in the envelope?”
“More money than I ever dreamed of seeing in one place.”
At that moment the wind kicked up again. Waves were crashing over the boats.
“This is going to be a big one,” Hogarth said, looking away. “I’m going to have to bring Kathleen Marie up to dry land, I think.”
“First you’ve got to tell me why they gave you all that money.”
“They said it was for my years of service. But Mrs. Hoffman, she has a way of telling you things without actually saying them. She spoke of Dominique’s death as if somehow it could be construed to be my fault. She wasn’t blaming me, she insisted, but she implied others might. So it was best that I say I wasn’t at the helm of the ship that day. It was best to say Dominique had gone out on her own.” He frowned. “The money guaranteed my silence.”
“But it didn’t.”
“Nope. Look, Detective, I took that money in the first place because my daughter, Kathleen Marie, was sick and I thought it could maybe help her. But no amount of money was going to save her. She was in the end stages of leukemia, and I realized that taking that money was like making a deal with the devil, and you know that never works out. In fact, it might have even hurt Kathleen’s chances of getting into heaven.” Hogarth took a step closer to Joe. “Blood money. That’s what it was. I took that envelope and handed it back to Mrs. Hoffman and went down to the station to speak with Chief Davis. Don’t you see, Detective? They gave me that money to keep me from implicating David.”
“Well, now, he can’t be blamed for a storm.”
“But what he did, he did before the storm hit. I called down to the cabin at the first sign of rough waters. And no one was there. At least, Dominique wasn’t.”
“Where had she gone?”
“I think David threw her overboard while they were arguing.”
“You wouldn’t have heard this?”
“Not necessarily. And besides, just seconds later, by my reckoning, the storm kicked in, so that’s what I was focused on. That’s when I think David took the lifeboat and left me to go down with the ship. When I showed up alive, I was a problem that had to be dealt with.”
Joe narrowed his eyes at the captain. “It’s a compelling story, but you have no evidence to back up your accusation. It’s far more believable that the storm knocked Dominique overboard, perhaps as she was trying to secure the lifeboat for herself.”
“That storm is hardly a believable alibi.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because there was no indication of a storm before it hit. No forecasts. Nothing. Not a cloud in the sky. Later, the Coast Guard would record that a brief storm had indeed struck the area, but they were baffled that they hadn’t seen it coming. And its duration—let me tell you, Detective, I’ve been sailing these waters for forty years and I’ve never seen a storm whip up like that out of nowhere so suddenly and then disappear just as quickly.”
“Then how do you account for it?”
“I told you. I don’t.” Hogarth sighed. “Except . . . maybe there’s something to those stories the servants always told. Stories about witchcraft and black magic.”
“You don’t buy any of that.”
“Maybe not fully. But there’s something in that house. Dominique . . . she had some curious hobbies. Have you seen those statues of angels with the heads of cows? And when they brought that vodou priestess in to cook for them—”
“Vodou priestess?”
“Variola. The chef. She and Hoffman and Dominique were always whispering together, scuttling around through the house . . .”
Joe took out his notepad and asked Hogarth to spell the chef’s name for him.
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” the old man said after he was finished spelling. “I’ll happily come down to the station if you like and give my testimony again—that is, if you can get the chief to listen to me this time.”
“I’ll let you know if that’s necessary, Captain.”
Hogarth rubbed his rough hands together. “Well, I’ve really got to hustle and get Kathleen Marie out of the water and tied up safely somewhere. Can I go now? We done here?”
“Yes. That’s all the questions I have for now. Thank you.”
Hogarth nodded and returned to work, scrambling down the ladder to his boat like a man far younger than his years. Joe watched him for a while, then looked out at the crashing sea. Sails and banners were flapping furiously. The sky had become even darker. The hurricane was approaching quickly, Joe realized.
And it was going to be a doozy.