Mission Creek is a narrow body of water that leads inland from China Basin, a dead-end canal spanned by the Third and Fourth Street drawbridges-all that is left of old Mission Bay, landfill having claimed the rest. The creek is flanked on one side by warehouses, freight consolidators, and industrial outfits that line parallel Channel Street; on another side by part of the Southern Pacific freight yards; on another by empty storage lots. And over it all loom the curving ramps and overpasses of Highway 280’s city terminus. Standing down there along the canal, you can hear the steady thrum of traffic, the air horns on the commuter trains that move in and out of the SP Depot at Third and Townsend, the throb and roar of trucks and heavy machinery. And yet there is something about Mission Creek itself, a kind of timeless solitude, that seems to keep it aloof from its hectic surroundings.
Up until about ten years ago, the canal had harbored a rotting pier and pilings, a lot of sea birds, schools of anchovies and perch, and several squatters who lived on and fished from ragamuffin barges, hay scows, converted Navy landing craft, cabin cruisers, and houseboats. When the Port Authority threatened to evict the boat people in the mid-seventies, with the idea of turning the channel into a modern landscaped marina, the waterfolk had got their act together, formed the Mission Creek Harbor Association, and hired a lawyer to intercede on their behalf with the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The result was that they had not only been allowed to stay, but had received a kind of official sanction-the only stipulation being that they clean up the area and maintain it in an acceptable fashion.
The boat people had been scrupulous about keeping their part of the bargain: Mission Creek was a pretty decent place these days, a haven for boat lovers, artists, artisans, and average citizens who disliked conventional city living. There were more than fifty authorized slips, all of them occupied, extending in a nice orderly row up the middle of the creek, with several security-gated ramps giving access to them from the Channel Street embankment. Most of the craft in there now were houseboats of one type or another, sailboats, and cabin cruisers; and most of them were well cared for, if a little on the funky side.
I parked in one of the slots down toward Fourth Street, walked past a gaggle of geese and one of the Port-O-Johns that were strategically placed along the embankment-most of the berthed craft would have chemical toilets, but that kind of waste disposal can be a problem-and went to the nearest access ramp. The security gate there was standing open; it was probably kept locked only at night. I descended onto a narrow board float set almost flush with the murky water of the creek, bordered on one side by the slips and on the other by horizontally arranged logs along which were strung electrical cables and water hookups. The first person I saw was a bearded guy in his thirties, doing some work on the deck of a green cabin cruiser; the smell of creosote coming off him and the boat was strong in the thin cold air. I asked him where I could find the boat belonging to Melanie Purcell, and he pointed back toward Fourth Street and said, “Eight slips that way. Houseboat with the decals.”
I moved along in that direction. Gulls and something I took to be a heron wheeled overhead; the water made little slapping sounds against the float and the moored boats. The sounds of the freeway traffic and the SP trains seemed remote, as if they were coming from some dimension or continuum once removed. The houseboat in the eighth slip down had decals all over the front of it-big flower things made out of wood and painted different pastel colors. It also had a peaked roof, some odd angles, varnished wood siding, a pair of bubble skylights, and a round stained-glass window high up under the eaves of its roof.
I didn’t see a door anywhere; it had to be around on the aft side. I stepped on board and started that way along a narrow starboard walkway. But I got only as far as a shuttered window halfway along before the noises coming from inside stopped me. Two people were having sex in there, and they weren’t being quiet about it. For that matter, they weren’t even being civilized about it.
Voyeurism isn’t one of my vices; I backed away in a hurry and disembarked onto the board float. Once, several months ago, Kerry had rented an X-rated videotape and played it for us on the new VCR she’d bought, just so we could see what one of those things was all about. What it was all about embarrassed the hell out of me, as old as I am. I quit watching after about five minutes, but Kerry stuck with it for another twenty or so. It wasn’t because it made her hot, she said; it was because she thought all those moans and groans and gyrations were funny-in a perverse way, of course. I hadn’t believed her for a minute, not before she half dragged me into the bedroom and definitely not afterward.
I climbed up to the embankment and walked along it a ways, killing time. Down where Channel Street right-angles into Sixth, in the shadow of the freeway looming high overhead, some of the Mission Creek residents had turned an acre or so of ground into a surprisingly impressive vegetable garden. Corn, beans, zucchini, strawberries, some other things. It really was a whole different world down here, a little self-contained community that continued to flourish outside the mainstream of city life. Somehow, in a way that I couldn’t quite define, it gave me a feeling of hope.
After about ten minutes I went back down to the float, along it to Melanie Purcell’s houseboat. This time, when I got as far as the starboard window, nobody was making any noise inside. So I kept moving aft. Around back there was a little oblong deck floored in green Astro-turf and, in the middle of the decal-decorated superstructure, a door that I proceeded to bang on. Nothing happened, so I banged on it again.
It opened abruptly and I was looking at a bulky guy in his early twenties, naked except for a pair of Levi’s. He had sandy hair puffed out in one of those frizzes, and judging from the scowl on his face, he also had a lousy disposition. He looked me over, decided I was nobody he knew or wanted to know, and said, “What is it?”
“Richard Dessault?” That was the name of the guy Melanie was living with. His occupation, according to Ben Klein, was “poet.” Some occupation.
“So?” he said. “You want something?”
“Not from you. I’d like to talk to Melanie.”
“What for?”
“To ask her some questions about her uncle’s death.”
“Ah, Christ,” he said disgustedly, “ another cop.”
“I’m a detective, that’s right, but not a-”
He shut the door in my face.
It would have made me mad, except that he didn’t shut it all the way; the wind blew it open again. He was moving away across the room inside, toward another door at the opposite end, and when he felt the cold air against his bare skin he said without looking back at me, “Come on in then. I’ll get her.”
I went in and closed the door, making sure it latched this time, and had a look around. There wasn’t much to see. The basic furnishings were a couple of low-slung teakwood tables, a pair of Oriental-style lamps, and a bunch of big pillows-shiny material in a variety of colors and exotic designs, most of them with tassels and fringe-scattered around on the floor. On one of the tables was a fancy water pipe-a hookah, I think they’re called-that you use to smoke tobacco, among other substances. It was all supposed to create a sultan’s harem effect. But the color TV and stereo equipment along one wall spoiled it; so did the overblown wall poster of some weird rock group called the Aluminum Dandruff.
I waited about two minutes. I could hear voices from one of the other rooms, but not what was being said. It was a little chilly in there, but then maybe they depended on body heat to keep them warm; they had been generating enough of it a few minutes ago. Another of their heating devices, no doubt, was marijuana. The sweetish, acrid smell of it was sharp in the air.
The table nearest me had a note pad and pencil on it. There was some writing on the pad; nosily I moved over a couple of steps and bent down to look at it. Nine lines, almost illegibly printed, under the title “Acapulco Gold”: gold, gold can’t feel blue with the gold- gold in the sunset, gold in the hills and valleys of my mind- the big gold rush gold, gold digging the gold- the big gold rush
I straightened up again. Poet, my ass, I thought.
The voices stopped finally, and the door across the room opened, and a girl came in. Dessault came in, too, but he hung back by the far wall while she moved forward to where I was. I don’t know what I expected her to be like-beautiful and dripping sex appeal, maybe, like heiresses in bad Hollywood movies-but she was a surprise in any case. Not much past twenty-one, skinny, flat-chested, with mouse-brown hair frizzed up like Dessault’s and bright vulpine eyes, one of which was slightly cocked. On both cheeks, which were still flushed from her recent exertion, little patches of acne flourished. She wore Levi’s and a tank top that made her chest look even flatter. Her feet were bare and dirty and the toenails were painted black.
Sugar and spice and everything nice, I thought sourly.
I said, “Melanie Purcell?”
“That’s right. Who’re you?”
I told her my name.
“Cop, huh?” she said.
“No. Private investigator.”
A frown pinched her forehead and pulled her thin little mouth out of shape; the one cockeye seemed to be looking a couple of inches to my left. “You told Richie you were a cop.”
“No I didn’t. He jumped to that conclusion.”
Dessault pushed away from the wall. “You don’t have to talk to him, Mel,” he said to her. “What’s he snooping around for anyway?”
I looked at him. He looked back at me for a while, not too long; then he said, “Ah, shit,” and made a production out of lighting a cigarette-the legal kind that only give you lung cancer.
“What do you want?” Melanie asked me. She sounded sullen and distracted, as if her thoughts were on something else. More fun and games, probably. “Who sent you here?”
“Nobody sent me. I’m investigating your uncle’s death.”
“Leonard? What for?”
She was a sweetheart, all right. “He was murdered,” I said. “Or didn’t anybody tell you?”
“You don’t have to be a smart-ass,” she said, as if she were talking to somebody her own age. “All I’ve done lately is talk to cops. I’m tired of it.”
“You sound real broken up about Leonard’s death.”
“We weren’t close. Besides, he was a damn fag.”
“Uh-huh. And you don’t like fags, right?”
“Right.”
“What would you say if I told you I’m working for Tom Washburn?”
“Him,” she said. “You a fag too?”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. Look, Miss Purcell, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here, believe me. Just answer a few questions and I’ll go away.”
“What questions?”
“About your father and the night he died.”
“Christ,” Dessault said, “not that trip again.”
I looked his way. “What trip is that?”
“That somebody killed Mel’s old man too. Nobody killed him. The old bastard drank too much Scotch and forgot to watch where he was walking, that’s all.”
“You share that opinion, Miss Purcell?”
She shrugged. “Nobody liked Kenneth; he was a prick. I suppose somebody could’ve pushed him but I don’t think so.”
A prick, I thought. Her own father. “You didn’t like him much, I take it.”
“I had plenty of reason not to. The only nice thing he ever did for me was die and leave me some money.”
“A third of his estate.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But that bitch Alicia got the choicest chunk.”
“Probably use it to buy a company that makes dildos,” Dessault said, and they both laughed.
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. So I asked Melanie the same question.
“She collects men,” the girl said. “She’ll fuck anything in pants.”
“Or out of pants,” Dessault said. They both laughed again.
“Was that the case while your father was alive?”
“Well, sure,” she said. “What’d you think, she was a faithful wife or something?”
“Did your father know about her affairs?”
“Sure. He didn’t care. Had plenty of his own.”
“His own affairs?”
“That’s right.”
Nice family. The more I found out about them, the more all-American they looked. “Any woman in particular?”
“Not that I knew about.”
“How about Alicia? Any particular man?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I probably will. You were at the party the night your father died, weren’t you?”
“For a while. I left about eight.”
“Why so early?”
“Those friends of his, those rich pigs, bore me out of my skull.”
“Then why go in the first place?”
“I needed some bread so Richie and I could split for Hawaii. We know some people on the Big Island.” Dessault smirked when she said that. Which probably meant that they had been planning some kind of drug buy; a lot of marijuana is grown in the back-country of Hawaii’s Big Island. “Kenneth wanted me to come to the party, see some snuff box he’d bought, so I went. He wasn’t too hard to deal with when he was in a good mood and you did what he wanted.”
“Why didn’t he invite your boyfriend here?” Dessault’s name had not been on the guest list.
“He didn’t like Richie,” she said. “Didn’t understand him or his poetry.”
Score one for Kenneth.
I said, “You get your money that night?”
“Damn right.”
“So he was in good spirits.”
“Sure he was,” Dessault said. “Kind that come out of a bottle.”
Melanie snickered. I didn’t say anything.
The girl said, “I told you, he’d got this snuff box. One of a kind or something, worth a lot of money. Crap like that made him happy.”
“Did he say where he got the box?”
“No.”
“Do you know anybody who speaks with a Latin accent?”
The abrupt shift in questions seemed to confuse her, throw her off balance. “Latin? You mean Mexican?”
“Mexican, South American-like that.”
Dessault had come away from the wall again and was scowling at me. “How come you want to know that? What does that have to do with anything?”
I ignored him. “Well?” I asked Melanie. “Anybody?”
“No,” she said. “The only person I know with an accent is Alex Ozimas.”
“Who’s he?”
“Filipino fag. He and Kenneth had some business deals.”
“What kind of business?”
“Who knows? I never asked.”
“I thought your father didn’t like homosexuals.”
“He didn’t. But he’d do business with anybody. Alex was at the house a couple of times while I was there. He was there that night, come to think of it.”
“The night Kenneth died?”
“Yeah.”
“His name isn’t on the guest list.”
“Well, he was just leaving when I got there.”
“What time was that?”
“After five. Five-thirty, about.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
“Your father mention him?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know why he was there.”
“No.”
“You have any idea where he lives?”
“In the city someplace, I think.”
“Anything else you can tell me about him?”
“No.”
Dessault punched out his cigarette in an abalone shell ashtray and moved up to stand alongside the girl. He put one hand on the back of her neck, began to rub it, and she shivered visibly and leaned against him. She had it bad, all right. But then, maybe he was what she deserved.
He said, “Listen, we’ve had about enough of this. We’ve got things to do. Haven’t we, Mel?”
She looked up at him; but with the cockeye, it seemed as if she were still looking at me. “Yes,” she said. “Lots of things to do.”
“So why don’t you just get out of here,” he said to me. “Right now.”
I could have pushed it; I felt like pushing it. These two had put me in a foul mood. But I had run out of questions to ask, and besides, the atmosphere of the place was oppressive and I was as sick of them as they were of me.
“Okay,” I said. “But maybe I’ll be back.”
“You’ll talk to yourself if you do. You won’t get in.”
There was nothing more to say. I put my back to them and went to the door. But Dessault followed me, so that when I turned coming out on deck, he was about two feet away.
I couldn’t resist the impulse; I said, “ ‘Gold in the hills and valleys of my mind, the big gold rush.’ That’s real good stuff, Richie. Ferlinghetti would love it.”
“Fuck you,” he said, like the poet he wasn’t, and for the second time in twenty minutes he shut the door in my face.