The Naked Detective by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online Page B

routine. To me it's much more serious than that. It's ritual, one of those carefully evolved, scrupulously repeated patterns that define a life, that make it recognizable to the person living it. Violate those rituals, disrupt those private ceremonies, and who knows what else will go ker-blooey?
    Still, when I'd packed up my gear and dropped it in the basket of my bike, I just couldn't get the thing to steer toward home. It pointed stubbornly downtown and toward the harbor. Gradually I understood that it was pointing toward Redmond's Boatyard. I felt I had no choice but to follow it, even though I couldn't tell if it was Kenny Lukens or Maggie the yoga teacher I needed to get closer to.
    Redmond's is at the north end of the Bight, at a nick in the shore that not long ago was known as Toxic Triangle. The old electric plant looms over Toxic; the gigantic coast guard pier hems in one side of it. The water part of the Triangle used to be a seedily carefree place where nobody paid rent and hardly anyone had all their teeth. Derelict boats tied lines to tilted pilings or settled gently into dockside muck; their denizens nailed lawn furniture onto splintery decks and lived on six-packs and pork rinds. People slept in hammocks slung from masts, and scruffy dogs ran around with fish heads in their jaws.
    Local wisdom had it that Toxic was too funky and too outlaw ever to be gentrified. Ha. It's called North Haven Marina now—another of those places whose former moniker has been officially expunged. Costs two bucks a foot to park your boat there for a night, and dock girls trained to call everybody Captain come running up to pump your gas.
    A small irony is that Redmond's dry dock used to be the upscale part of Greater Toxic. People actually paid for space there. There were showers, electricity—it was practically suburban. Now, next to the gleaming new marina, Redmond's seemed a blot and an embarrassment. The yard was dusty and unpaved; the vessels anything but yachty. How long till the city found a way to worm out of the lease?
    I pedaled through the rusty street-side gate, clattered over potholes and lumps of coral rock. Boats loomed all around me in untidy rows, propped in cradles, suspended from canvas straps, resting precariously on spindly jacks. Maybe it was just my mood, but I found an awful pathos in those landlocked boats. They seemed defeated, punished with exile for their failures. Paint curled on their desiccated bottoms. Their waterline stripes looked futile in the unbuoyant air. Rudders waved at nothing; keels spiked downward to no effect.
    I rode and looked around, and after a couple minutes I found Kenny Lukens' sailboat.
    I was sure it was his, though I could not have recognized a Morgan forty-one. It was the name on the transom that made me certain—though Kenny had never mentioned the name. It was stamped in gold block letters framed in navy blue, and the honest truth is that it broke my heart. It was called Dream Chaser .
    There was a fellow standing by the boat, working on it, fairing the hull with a small hand sander. He was spare and lean and his skin had tanned to a rosewood color; his hair was so blond it was white; it stood straight up. He wore flip-flops and a tiny orange bathing suit flecked with paint. I pedaled up to him and said hello.
    "Your boat?" I asked.
    "Oh yawh," he said happily. His eyes changed to slits when he smiled. His sun-bleached eyelashes all but disappeared.
    "She's beautiful."
    He beamed. "Oh yawh."
    "Had 'er long?"
    "Fife months. Buy her almost soon as I arrife." There was pride in his voice, wonder on his flat frank face.
    "Where ya from?"
    "Riga," he said. "Latvia. Latvian I am. My name is Andrus."
    "I'm Pete. You're a long way from home."
    "Denks God. Latvia, your ass it freezes off."
    "The boat—you bought it here?"
    "Right vere she is sitting," he said. "Good deal too. Only unpaid bills is vat I'm paying."
    I smiled for the Latvian's good luck though this made me very sad. Why