Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [34]
I opened the door that led down into the engine room, and the smell of diesel dilated my nostrils like a dose of smelling salts. I got out the flashlight, climbed down the ladder into the pit, and found the light switch.
I turned around and faced the miniature city of pumps and pipes, twisted like intestines, my eyes fanning left and right until they crossed over the body of a man slumped backward over a bilge pump. I sprang back so fast that I struck my elbow on the edge of the ladder, sending a jolt of pain into the nerve. My flashlight flew through the air and rolled across the floor, but I didn’t bother to pick it up. I just stood there, crouched over, rubbing my elbow and staring at the dead man with all the adrenaline in my body now concentrated in my heart.
I took some very deep breaths and straightened up, never taking my eyes from the corpse. When my heart rate slipped under two hundred, I walked over to where the man lay and stood above him. He was wearing a pair of white Bermuda shorts and a white guayabara shirt that was no longer white because of all the blood on his chest. His arms and legs were splayed apart as though he’d been blasted by a gale-force wind. I studied his face. He was in his late thirties, deeply tanned, and as handsome as a Ken doll, with a black, neatly trimmed mustache that had flecks of gray in it. His salt-and-pepper hair was closely cropped. His brown eyes stared without sight at the low ceiling. I recognized him. He was the second man in the video, and, like Matson’s, his acting days were over.
Shit, I said to myself. Nobody had mentioned anything about a two-for-one deal.
Now I knew for a fact that I’d been played. It was conceivable that Vivian might have shot Matson; crimes of passion happen all the time. But she wasn’t mean and crazy enough to chase down and shoot another man. I knew somebody who was, though. For him it would have been easy.
I also thought I knew how it might have happened. Vivian had gone out to meet Matson in order to get the video and whatever else Matson was needling her and her father with. Assuming for the moment that her father had been telling the truth about her going out there on a Jet Ski, then the only way for Williams to have made it out to the yacht without being either seen or heard would be to swim out. It wasn’t that far, a few hundred yards. He might even have used diving gear. He would have climbed on board and found a place from which he could watch or at least listen to the negotiations for the tape. Whether he knew there was a second man aboard remained to be seen.
So let’s say—assuming that she was even armed in the first place—that Vivian had gotten mad and, out of frustration, popped a cap into Matson’s leering face. The surprise guest may have made a break for the engine room, at which point Williams would have gone after him, knowing he couldn’t afford to let him get away or get to a weapon. That was one possible scenario, but there was another possibility, and I liked it a little better, not just because it exonerated Vivian of murder but because it felt right.
It may well have been that the Colonel, without telling his daughter, had come to the conclusion that Matson had to go. He would have let Vivian think she was going out to the meeting alone, without knowing that Williams was shadowing her or, more likely, that he was already out in the water, near the yacht, waiting for her to show up. Better that she not know. That way her performance with Matson would be more natural. There would be no telltale nervousness to make him suspicious. Then Williams would have made his move, catching both Matson and Vivian by surprise.
The second man may have been at the bar when the gun went off and then made a run for it, or maybe after hearing the sound of the shot he’d come running