Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [80]
Professor Haslett was studying me. “You look different. Is it that you’ve cut your hair?”
“Yes.”
“Very becoming.” He motioned for me to share his bench, offered half of the sandwich. I accepted the former, declined the latter. “Strange,” he added. “I spoke with Melvin last night and he didn’t mention you were visiting.”
“I’m not. This is a business trip, and I haven’t called them because time is short and my mother would be disappointed that we can’t have a real visit.”
“And of course she would worry. Kay frets because your work is so dangerous.”
“Normally it isn’t; she magnifies the danger. Actually, Professor Haslett, I was hoping you could give me some information. I called your home, and your housekeeper told me I could find you here.”
His smile became edged with melancholy. “I suppose you find my behavior strange, perhaps even pathetic. An old man who should possess more dignity, aping the attire of his boyhood heroes, sitting on a bench beside his beloved harbor and mourning the past.”
Haslett was a historian who had written a definitive history of San Diego Bay; if he mourned the past, he had more right than most of us because he knew it so intimately. I said, “I see a man who’s wearing the clothes he’s comfortable in and enjoying a place that’s still lovely. I wish I could spend my Saturday that way.”
“If you can enjoy merely sitting quietly and looking at the harbor, you’re as unusual a young woman as your mother claims,” he told me. “People today don’t possess the capacity for contemplation; they want to be entertained. And they don’t honor the past, quite frankly don’t have any interest in it. My former students are good examples: most of them elected to take history merely to satisfy a requirement; they wanted to be fed the facts and have them interpreted for them, so they could spit them back during their exams and scratch off yet another item on their educational shopping list. I was quite happy to retire from active scholarship.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Five years now. Not that I’ve retired mentally, mind you. I may appear to be merely another eccentric old man taking the sun, but actually I am conducting research for what will be my final long work—an analysis of the reasons for our port’s decline.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
“Not with bated breath, I hope.” He winked. “I am approaching seventy-eight and find myself enjoying the research far more than the writing.”
I smiled and for a moment we watched a fisherman struggling along the dock with a heavy bucket. Then I said, “It’s your expertise on maritime matters that I hope to tap into. What can you tell me about a Mexican tuna fishing fleet owner named Gilbert Fontes?”
Haslett pursed his lips—more belligerently than thoughtfully. “Fontes is a good example of the forces that have destroyed our port. The Corona Fleet was once the largest in our harbor. Fontes bought it in ’seventy-two. His first act was to reregister the vessels in Mexico—his method of evading the U.S. inspections mandated by the new Marine Mammal Protection Act. When they found out, local environmentalists … I believe you’re an environmentalist? Didn’t we talk at Christmas of that dreadful business you were involved in up at Tufa Lake?”
I nodded. “I don’t belong to any of the organizations, although I contribute money when I can. Organizations and I don’t get on too well.”
“I’m not a fan of them myself. To get back to Fontes, in the mid-seventies local environmentalists staged protests at his home on Point Loma. The situation got out of hand. Fontes had … what shall I call them? Bodyguards?”
“I know a man who calls them his ‘people.’ The right word is ‘thugs.’ ”
“Yes. Fontes had thugs, and they beat some of the protesters quite badly. The violence escalated. A neighborhood group got up in arms—not against the protesters, but against Fontes. Do you know what his response was?”
I shook my head.
“He moved the fleet to Ensenada, nearly bankrupting one of our