maximum marketing impact. The door was open with the cameraman strapped in the opening. Another TV chopper followed close on its tail as we made lazy circles in the channel. Soon, the sky above and around the harbor breakwater looked like an aerial parking lot for giant mechanical dragonflies.
Ignoring the circus in the sky, I spilled everything, especially the part about how I thought it had been a botched drug rip-off and how professional my assailants had been.
'But not professional enough for you, eh, Doc?' Sloane gave me the same curiously wary look he wore whenever my military service came up. He had seen my DD214, the official discharge document issued by the Department of Defense summarizing my military service. A lot of stuff was too classified to put on it. I didn't talk about it and Sloane was too smart to pry. Guzman steered the craft slowly to the sheriff's dock.
'Just lucky,' I said, and shrugged.
'Lucky!' Sloane scoffed. 'If you'd've been lucky, the bastards would've hit the right boat and not yours.' He mumbled, 'You have any idea how much freaking paperwork this is going to be? Not to mention that bozo season is here and I can't afford to lose a good reserve officer.'
I was about to make a sarcastic wisecrack about how sorry I was for his terrible evening when my cell made a fuzzy buzzing sound. The wet speaker had a hard time with Robert's Johnson's 'Crossroad Blues,' which I used as my ring tone, but I was amazed the phone still worked.
I answered and froze at the sound of a full, melodic, and all too familiar voice.
'Mr. Stone?'
I checked my watch. 'Jasmine?'
'It's me. My flight was one of those very rare creatures that arrived early.'
'Oh, jeez!' I blurted. 'No, don't…I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Its just…I've been…my boat's been in an accident and-'
'You okay?'
'For now. But there's going to be a lot of paperwork and the usual hassles.'
'Okay. Look, I booked a room at the Crown Plaza right near LAX. Why don't I check in and call you in the morning?'
Guzman brought the inflatable to soft landing at the dock. Sloane grabbed the inflatable's bow line, jumped out, and tied it to the nearest cleat. He took the stern line from Guzman and did the same.
'Look, it's okay.' Jasmine's voice was warm and confident, like her mother's. I'm not a tourist here.'
I had once clipped a Newsweek article on Vanessa with a sidebar on Jasmine. She'd graduated from USC, then Stanford law school, clerked for a justice on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, then went to work with her mother in New York. When Vanessa moved to Mississippi, Jasmine stayed up North with a multimegaton Manhattan law firm. I manipulated the dates of the articles in my head and figured that Jasmine was in her midor maybe late thirties.
Then six months ago, after Vanessa's murder, Jasmine had come home to continue her mother's legacy at the Advocacy Foundation for Mississippi Justice, a Delta powerhouse inspired by Martha Bergmark's Mississippi Center for Justice down in Jackson.
'Still-' I stuttered.
'Still nothing. Take care of business and call me in the morning.' The confidence and generosity in her voice amazed me and fooled me again into believing for an instant that I was talking to Vanessa. The daughter's genes had fallen right close the source, I thought, at least the DNA from Vanessa had. No one actually knew about the other half.
I stood there with the phone in my hand, thinking about the mystery of DNA and how it encapsulated the strong and independent thinking that had made Vanessa so incorruptibly autonomous. I wondered whether Jasmine had the same stuff.
Most of what I knew about both of them came from magazine and newspaper articles about Vanessa I had occasionally clipped and thrown into an expandable file. Some I had read and reread until the edges frayed and carried the smudges of my fingers.
When I married Camilla, I put the file in storage, a symbolic putting away of all others.
After the accident when we knew Camilla's coma had no end and I could no longer face the ghosts in our house, I took to living aboard the Jambalaya three or four nights a week and the rest at a cot in my office. I dragged Vanessa's old file down to the J ambalaya. At first, I'd sit belowdecks and simply touch the file. Every time I tried to open it, I'd see Camilla wasting away on her motorized hospital bed with the panoramic view of the Pacific, which no one could tell if she saw or not. Legally we remained husband and wife, but the coma had evicted the real Camilla from the body. Still, I remained faithful to the memory of Camilla, to the idea of who she had been. My nondecision to remain poised without action haunted every part of my life.
The day Vanessa was buried, my heart told me I could read her file without the spirits of adultery reaching out for me. From that cold winter day until this very morning, I'd sit aboard the Jambalaya- in the cockpit on warm sunny days and down below in the main cabin at night-and reread the pieces written about her. I was surprised at how complete a record I had collected, going back almost thirty years. Sometimes I felt guilty when I read the pieces, wondering at first, then knowing in my heart that Camilla had always been my second choice.
With Jasmine's voice echoing in my head, I remembered a New York Times article that emphasized that Jasmine had never met her father. She had been conceived during a one-night stand back in the licentious 1970s when Vanessa was a volunteer at a San Francisco law firm representing Native Americans arrested in the occupation of Alcatraz.
Vanessa's quote from the article struck me now as I listened to her daughter: 'Good breeding material doesn't necessarily make for a good parent. Too damn many black children grow up with episodic and unreliable fathers who create expectations of love and trust that rank several steps below the family dog. I also didn't like the way abortion felt for me, so I raised her myself.'
All of this hurtled through my mind as I struggled to say something intelligent to Vanessa's daughter. I came off inarticulate and banal, then said good-bye.
'Daughter of an old friend,' I said to Sloane as he stood on the dock looking down at me. He raised the eyebrow that said he had questions that could wait. When he extended his hand, I accepted it.
'Thanks, Sarge.'
He grunted something I took as a 'You're welcome.'
We walked toward the Coast Guard and sheriff's building, but it no longer felt familiar and secure to me. Now it loomed alien and full of unknown menace as we pushed through the doors and headed for the suspect-interview rooms where the doors locked from the outside.
Vince grabbed a first-aid kit on the way in. 'Technically, we oughta have the paramedics look at this,' he mumbled as he wiped at my earlobe with an alcohol pad, which burned worse than the original wound.
'Hell, that's not even big enough to put a Band-Aid on,' Vince said.
He slapped me on the shoulder, then left me alone to wrestle with life, death, murder, and salvation. Little did I know that the enormity of what had just happened would pale into insignificance within just a few hours.
CHAPTER 19
Fifteen minutes later, two plainclothes officers I had hoped never to see walked in. Internal Affairs was a lot like the Internal Revenue Service: necessary for the proper functioning of the organization, but best if never actually experienced firsthand. They interviewed me until nearly midnight. They had a job to do, but their assumption I was guilty pissed me off.
I told my story three times, first with both the investigators, then, by turns, with each of them alone. They asked me about my military background and tried to pry into the classified stuff. I told them they should talk to Vince or to call the Pentagon. I gave them the number.
They left the room by turns, and from the follow-up questions they asked after returning, I surmised they had called the Pentagon and interviewed Vince. Clearly they had also interviewed witnesses on the other boats, obtained copies of the duty logs from the Coast Guard and sheriff's dispatchers, and listened to the radio tapes of my Mayday calls. Their swift professionalism made me feel a lot less like an Inquisition victim.
