As we headed to the parking lot to meet up with Roy, I said, “I owe you for making my son think I might not be completely uncool. He’s looking forward to this yacht trip so much, he’s even willing to hang out with his dad.”
He gave a sympathetic laugh. “How old is he, again?”
“Nineteen.”
“Lord.” He shook his head. “The teenage years are a special kind of hell, aren’t they.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Eighteen next month. And she’s a wonderful girl, doing great in school, but… Lord.”
I laughed. “I hope for your sake she doesn’t listen to Nordic death metal music.”
He didn’t know what that was, so I shared what little I knew.
In disbelief, he said, “Your boy listens to that?”
“Little bit. He picked it up from friends, unfortunately.”
“Leland,” he said, “if your boy comes near my daughter and she starts listening to that, I swear, I will rescind the invitation I was planning to extend for you to come to my Christmas party this year.”
“On the yacht?”
He nodded.
“You have my word,” I said.
Noah met us at the parking lot, and Roy drove us all down to the marina. The Lady Jane was at the dock, looking like a postcard, with graceful palm trees framing it as we approached. It was fifty or sixty feet long, and strips of lit-up windows showed it had two levels below the deck.
“Dang!” said Noah.
Roy pulled into a parking spot and asked, “This your first time?”
“I been on motorboats,” he said. “And a sailboat once, and crawdad fishing. But nothing like this.”
Henry, in the passenger seat, said, “Well, your dad made a strong case I should invite you.”
“Awesome! Thanks, Dad.”
As Noah got out, Henry looked back at me and winked.
We headed down the dock. It was as finely made and tastefully lit as any up in Charleston, with lamps casting golden pools on the wood and small spotlights in the sand illuminating the boat. Henry, or Blue Seas, had spared no expense. Down in the sand I saw a worker, judging by the blue shirt they all wore, talking with a man in a suit that I thought I recognized.
Henry was asking Noah what his college plans were, so I asked Roy, “Isn’t that the investor you sent me to see? Collin Porter?”
Roy paused to peer down at them. “Yeah, that’s him. I guess he’ll be joining us tonight.”
He didn’t, though. Or, at any rate, he never joined us on deck.
26
Saturday, October 5, Afternoon
I’d finished drafting something Roy needed filed on Monday and was tapping a pen on the edge of my desk, thinking about Jackson’s case. I’d left one stone unturned, and it was bothering me. Who was that trucker, Pete, who Karl had hung out with? If he was the same guy Terri had said was trading opiates for sex, was that my angle in, to show that Karl had been dealing and had made himself some enemies in the process?
That night back in August, when Pat Warton was heading to his truck in the parking lot of the Broke Spoke, he’d told me Pete was a poker buddy of Karl’s. He’d also felt the need to add that he himself had “nothing to do with that,” which was a strange thing to say about an innocent poker game. I wondered what all he knew.
The weekend seemed like a good time to find him at home, so I headed over to the trailer park.
When I turned up the dirt road to the Wartons’ trailer, I saw Tim sitting in the mermaid chair with what I assumed was a bottle of malt liquor in hand. The only change since my visit in the summertime was that he had added a Hawaiian shirt to his shorts-and-tank-top ensemble, probably because temperatures had dropped to the low seventies. As I parked and stepped out, he gave a whistle of appreciation and yelled, “Check out the fancy new car, Mr. Lawyer!”
“Yep,” I said. “Moving on up in the world, I guess.” My silver Malibu had not sparked such enthusiasm in anyone else. I wondered if Tim was a little drunk already, even though it was only two in the afternoon.
We got to talking. I asked about the half-carved wooden sculpture behind him, which was nearly as tall as I was and portrayed a fish leaping out of waves. It was a striped bass, he explained, the official state fish of South Carolina, and the base of the sculpture, when he finished carving it, was going to look like our state flag. He had a lot to say about which woodworking tools he’d used and why.
Pat was nowhere to be seen, which I thought might be a blessing, since he had struck me as the more intelligent and paranoid of the two. Those weren’t qualities I wanted to deal with just now. A man who was talkative even when he wasn’t drinking, and who was most of the way through a forty-ounce bottle of what was indeed malt liquor, was much better.
“Hey, Tim,” I said, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “you ever play poker with your brother? Karl, I mean?”
“Not in years,” he said. “He wiped me out every time I ever did.”
“Yeah, I heard he was good. Played with some folks up in Charleston, from what I understand.”
“I guess. Oh, yeah, that’s how he got the Mustang, I remember.” He shook his head, smiling in admiration at Karl’s luck.
“Did he win that off a guy named Pete? Or was it someone else?”
“Don’t rightly know,” he said, taking a swig from his bottle. “Wouldn’t that be on the title? Who owned it before? I’d be interested to know where that car is, and who gets it now.”
“Well, if I worked for the government,” I said, “It’d be easy for me to look at the title. But I don’t. So I just wondered if you’d heard anything about that.”
He thought for a minute, tapping his foot like it might
