The Narrows - Michael Connelly [7]
The license seemed to appease him and he said we could talk in his boat or we could walk over to the chandlery to get a cup of coffee. I wanted to get a look inside his home and boat—it was basic investigative strategy—but didn’t want to be obvious about it so I told him I could use some caffeine.
The chandlery was a ship’s store that was a five-minute walk down the dock. We small-talked as we walked over and I mostly listened to Buddy complain about his portrayal in the movie that had been inspired by McCaleb’s heart transplant and his search for his donor’s killer.
“They paid you, didn’t they?” I asked when he was finished.
“Yes, but that’s not the point.”
“Yes it is. Put your money in the bank and forget about the rest. It’s just a movie.”
There were some tables and benches outside the chandlery and we took our coffees there. Lockridge started asking questions before I got the chance. I let him run his line out a little bit. My view was that he was a very important piece of my investigation, since he knew Terry McCaleb and was one of two witnesses to his death. I wanted him to feel comfortable with me so I let him ask away.
“So what’s your pedigree?” he asked. “Were you a cop?”
“Almost thirty years. With the LAPD. Half of the time I worked homicides.”
“Murders, huh? Did you know Terror?”
“What?”
“I mean, Terry. I called him Terror.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I just did. I give everyone nicknames. Terry had seen firsthand the terror of the world, you know what I mean? I called him Terror.”
“What about me? What’s my nickname going to be?”
“You . . .”
He looked at me like a sculptor sizing up a block of granite.
“Um, you are Suitcase Harry.”
“How come?”
“Because you’re sort of rumpled, like you live out of a suitcase.”
I nodded.
“Pretty good.”
“So, did you know Terry?”
“Yes, I knew him. We worked a few cases together when he was with the bureau. Then one more after he got the new heart.”
He snapped his fingers and pointed at me.
“Now I remember, you were the cop. You were the one who was here that night on his boat when those two goons showed up to do him in. You saved him and then he turned around and saved you.”
I nodded.
“That’s right. Now can I ask some questions, Buddy?”
He spread his hands wide, indicating he was available and had nothing to hide.
“Oh, sure, man, I didn’t mean to be hogging the microphone, you know?”
I took out my notebook and put it on the table.
“Thanks. Let’s start with that last charter. Tell me about it.”
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Lockridge expelled his breath.
“That’s a tall order,” he said.
But he began to tell me the story. What he initially told me matched the minimal accounts I had read in the Las Vegas papers and what I had then heard when I attended McCaleb’s funeral. McCaleb and Lockridge had been on a four-day, three-night charter, taking a party of one into waters off Baja California to fish for marlin. While returning to Avalon Harbor on Catalina on the fourth day McCaleb collapsed at the boat’s topside helm station. They were 22 miles off the coast, midway between San Diego and Los Angeles. A help call was radioed to the U.S. Coast Guard and a rescue chopper was dispatched. McCaleb was airlifted to a hospital in Long Beach, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
When he was finished telling it I nodded like it had matched everything I had already heard.
“Did you actually see him collapse?”
“No, not really. I felt it, though.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he was up on top at the wheel. I was in the pit with the charter party. We were headed north, going home. The party’d had enough fishing by then so we weren’t even trolling. Terry had it flat out, probably doing twenty-five knots. So me and Otto—he’s the party—we were in the cockpit and the boat suddenly made a ninety-degree turn to the west. Out to sea, man. I knew that wasn’t in the plan so I climbed up the ladder to poke my head up there and I see Terry sort of hunched over the wheel. He’d collapsed. I got to him and he was alive but,