Neptune's Eye (Aristotle Soc Socarides) Read online

  Neptune’s Eye

  BY PAUL KEMPRECOS

  SUSPENSE PUBLISHING

  Neptune’s Eye

  by

  Paul Kemprecos

  DIGITAL EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Suspense Publishing

  Cool Blue Tomb

  Copyright © 1991 by Paul Kemprecos

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  For my granddaughters, seven of the loveliest and most intelligent young ladies on the face of the planet.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the following people: Wreck diver and photographer Brian Skerry of the Boston Sea Rovers; Jim Jalbert of the Marine Systems Engineering Lab, University of New Hampshire; Peter Zentz of the Benthos Corporation in North Falmouth; Jeff Madison of the Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoag; Henry Keatts, author and U-boat expert, Joe Bangert, and Eric Goodkind in the office of Congressmen Gerry Studds. Special thanks to Chester Robinson, Jr. Any errors or omission are the sole responsibility of the author.

  “By their own follies they perished, the fools.”

  Homer—The Odyssey

  PROLOGUE

  1945

  The sound of doom was remarkably prosaic.

  It came as a muffled metallic crash, like a firecracker going off inside a distant rubbish bin. In the control room at midship, the commander took his eyes off the dial of the depth gauge he’d been studying and cocked his head to listen. He frowned in puzzlement. The noise was like nothing he had ever heard in years at sea.

  A second explosion reverberated through the boat’s pressure hull, louder this time. Even as the echoes faded, another followed. The bearded helmsman and the equally bewhiskered hydroplane operators turned to the commander and watched his lined and weary face intently, waiting for instructions. There was alarm in their eyes. The commander calmly reached for the microphone hanging from an overhead cable and barked the order.

  Close all watertight compartments.

  The whole procedure, from the first explosion to the commander’s directions, took about ten seconds. It might just as well have been ten years. As crewmen from one end of the boat to the other raced to follow orders, a deafening blast, louder than any that preceded it, rocked the pressure hull.

  The deck lurched violently. The commander was thrown off balance. He wrapped his arms around a vertical conduit pipe attached to the arched bulkhead and kept his footing. The crewmen grabbed onto the controls to keep from being flung from their seats. The boat shuddered and listed toward the stern. The diesels died. Forward motion came to a halt. Water had entered the engines.

  They were sinking.

  The commander called for battery power to keep the boat moving.

  The control room went dark. Water in the electric motors.

  The auxiliary power system came on, bathing the control room in a dim red glow. The commander glanced around at the hellish scene. Incredible. A minute ago they had been peacefully cruising at snorkel depth, recharging their main batteries. All was calm. All was secure. All was routine. All organized. Now this. Within seconds. Pandemonium.

  He responded coolly. He had a reputation for a methodical go-by-the-book attitude that bordered on the phlegmatic. It was the reason he had been picked for this important mission. He ordered the crew to dump ballast. Compressed air hissed into the main ballast tanks.

  The boat continued to sink stern-first.

  They blew water from all the tanks. The added air should have been more than enough to restore buoyancy, but the boat plunged further.

  The nose-up angle of descent became sharper. The emergency lights went out. Anguished shouts of panic in the darkness. Thuds and crashes. Bodies and objects smashed into the steel bulkheads.

  The commander slid down the pipe and sat on the floor. Crouching in the dark, strangely detached from the bedlam around him, he knew it was over. He wondered briefly about the steel box in his quarters, if its contents were worth the end of his fine new vessel and its young crew.

  Water was pouring in from the stern, surging from compartment to compartment, lapping around his feet. Strangely, instead of fear, the commander felt a serenity he had not known since the madness began in his country.

  Die decently, the higher-ups had said. What a laugh. As if men could be ordered to go with dignity when they were gagging under tons of seawater. He twisted his mouth in scorn. And moments later, when death finally found him, his lips were still frozen in a rictus of contempt.

  CHAPTER 1

  The telephone call that launched me into the search for Leslie Walther came on a delicious Cape Cod morning in late spring. Sunlight bathed Pleasant Bay in a soft buttery glow and the sea-cool air was sweeter than strawberry wine. From time to time the breeze freshened and a perfume of salt spray rose, sedge and beach-plum blossoms wafted onto the boathouse deck where I lounged, half-comatose, with Kojak the Maine coon cat stretched out beside me. The boathouse was part of a large estate before I bought it and moved in. The old place isn’t what it used to be. The roof leaks in a rainy southwest blow, and I have to crank the wood stove up to red-hot when the cold winter winds sweep down from Labrador. But the view of the misty barrier beach with the dark Atlantic beyond is a visual mantra, and I like to sit outside, gaze off at the ocean rim, and pretend the world is flat.

  I was trying to sell my flat-earth theory to Kojak, who wasn’t buying it. He was pretending to listen while he stared cross-eyed at a muscular ant struggling under the weight of a tortilla chip. I was at the part about the world being balanced on the back of a gigantic turtle when the cordless phone on the driftwood coffee table rang. I snagged the phone, stuck it in my ear, and managed a drowsy hello.

  “Mr. Aristotle Socarides?” a man’s voice said.

  “Speaking,” I answered, keeping an eye on Kojak, who had hoisted his bulky body onto all fours for a stretch. I lip-synched: Hey buddy, don’t go away. He yawned and licked one black paw.

  “My name is Winston Prayerly,” the man said in an English accent. “Would you be available this afternoon or early this evening? My employer, Mr. Frederick Walther, would like to discuss the possibility of retaining your services.”

  I sat up at attention. The prospect of a paying job stirred me from my lethargy. My last case was three months ago. A Wellfleet quahogger hired me to find a stolen outboard motor. The clam-digger suspected his estranged wife who told me she took it but said she’d bought the damn thing so the lazy bum couldn’t use a busted motor as an excuse to stay home and loaf. She showed me the check to prove it. The quahogger refused to pay me because I hadn’t delivered the goods, but the story had a happy ending. The shellfisherman and his wife joined a Pentecostal church, renewed their wedding vows, and the last I heard they were taking a second honeymoon in Cancún.

  I said: “I’ll have to check my schedule, Mr. Prayerly. Could you tell me where Mr. Walther lives? That would have a bearing.” Kojak sauntered toward the kitchen door. I tried to grab his scruffy tail, he bolted, and I fell out of the aluminum-and-plastic chaise lounge.

  “Not too far, Mr. Socarides. On Merrill’s Island in Chatham.”

  I scrambled back into the chair. “In that case, I can fit you in after lunch, Mr. Prayerly. How about one o’clock?”

  “Perfect. Let me give you directions.”

  A minute later I hung up and remembered what Homer said in the Odyssey, that our destiny lies on the knees of the gods. Or in my own less elegant metaphor, life is a crapshoot and somebody else is throwing the dice. Prayerly’s call proved Homer’s point nicely. My private detective work is incidental to my job as a commercial fisherman. I fit my investigations in around the migratory patterns of groundfish, never forgetting that my success at catching cod, not crooks, is what pays my bar-bill tab. Ordinarily, it was the time of year when my fishing partner, Sam, and I would have been hooking cod from his line trawler. But Sam was in Florida with his wife Millie, enjoying a trip to Disney World and Epcot on a VFW raffle ticket I bought them. Sam had been reluctant to go. I don’t think he’s been off-Cape since Cal Coolidge was president. I told him the codfishing could wait and he agreed it was cheaper to take a vacation than to settle with Millie in divorce court.

  I went into the boathouse and rummaged through the refrigerator for lunch goodies. The best I could do was two slices of bologna, rare, one egg over easy, and a stale Pepperidge Farm oatmeal raisin cookie for dessert. As I dined on the health-food special I thought about Winston Prayerly’s accent. His speech had been brushed with a layer of culture, but his diction needed another coat of paint because the flaws showed through. If you listened carefully, you could hear him rough up a vowel or manhandle a consonant, like an East
Boston tough trying to talk Back Bay Brahmin.

  After lunch I shaved, showered, exchanged my jeans and gila-monster sweatshirt for a pair of tan Levi’s corduroys, a button-down blue oxford cloth shirt, and a brown Harris tweed jacket I had picked up for $1.50 at the Catholic church thrift shop. I hadn’t seen lapels that wide since my father wore them, and if the Al Capone look ever came back, I’d be right in style. I had haggled the thrift-shop ladies down from two dollars. They weren’t happy about selling the jacket at a discount, but it had been a slow day.

  Sliding behind the wheel of my 1977 GMC pickup truck, I murmured a prayer and turned the ignition key. The engine coughed asthmatically and blue smoke billowed from the vibrating exhaust pipe that rattled against the frame like a machine gun. The truck is in the advanced stages of decrepitude and it’s a toss-up which will go first, the body or the engine. The pickup started on the fourth try, a good sign. I offered thanks to the high god General Motors and the miracle mechanic at the Sunoco station who keep the truck on life-support systems and then pointed it toward the half mile of sandy drive that leads to the main road.

  Merrill’s Island is a twenty-minute ride from my boathouse. Shortly before 1:00 P.M. I drove over the causeway that links the island to the mainland. The road is flanked by a shallow cove on one side and salt marsh laced by tidal creeks on the other. On Merrill’s Island itself, the rough natural beauty bordering the access road gave way to lawns as smooth as golf greens, as verdantly close to Astroturf as chemical science could make of living grass. A half-dozen houses have been built on the shoulders of the island, an oblong hill about a mile long. They’re great sprawling edifices as big as imperial mausoleums, owned by people who like privacy and can afford to pay for it, hidden from the world and from each other by uninviting thickets of trees and sharp-thorned shrubs.

  The Walther house was slightly smaller than a dirigible hanger. It sat at the southerly tip of the upland, surrounded like a game preserve by a high spiked stockade fence. The place was built in an English baronial style, rare on the Cape, where people like their houses faced with white cedar that weathers to silver, and would put shingles on their mattresses if they’re weren’t afraid of splinters. The house had Tudor timbers exposed in beige stucco and small windows with diamond-shaped panes except on the Atlantic side, where huge expanses of glass faced easterly onto a wide veranda. The view must have cost a thousand dollars a square foot, and it was probably worth every cent of it.

  An olive-green Mercedes sedan with Maryland plates crouched in the circular gravel drive. I pulled in behind it, walked up onto the wide porch, and rang the bell. The thick door was opened a few seconds later by a man about my height, just over six feet. He had balding black hair that could have been slicked back over his large meaty ears with two slices of buttered toast. His pale skin was as smooth as a salamander’s and it looked even whiter because of the contrast with his clothes. He was dressed like a paid mourner. Black blazer, black turtleneck, black slacks, and black Chinese rubber-soled slippers. I was sorry I hadn’t brought flowers and message of condolence for the dearly departed, whoever it might be.

  “Please come in, Mr. Socarides.” It was the same soft-spoken voice with the English accent I had heard on the phone.

  “Mr. Prayerly?” I stepped into a large circular lobby with high, beamed ceilings and a massive crystal chandelier.

  He nodded. “Wait here, please.” He went up a wide sweeping staircase. I strolled over to examine the exposed machinery of a tall grandfather clock. I was checking out the date on the face when Prayerly said, “Mr. Walther will see you now.” He was standing a couple of yards behind me, looking as if he had caught me trying to stuff the grandfather clock in my hip pocket. A quiet one, Mr. Prayerly. He led the way up the stairs to a spacious landing and into a drafty oak-paneled room several times larger and a lot neater than my boathouse.

  You could die happily in any one of the plump brown leather chairs after checking your blue-chip stocks in The Wall Street Journal, giving a loud harrumph, and smoking a fat Havana cigar. A log fire crackled in a walk-in medieval fireplace large enough to roast an elephant with an apple in its mouth. Ancient volumes filled the bookcases lining the walls. It was a room with a theme. War. Old war, fought at spear’s length. Shiny suits of armor stared vacantly out from each corner. Shields and halberds and flintlocks and paintings of battle scenes with soldiers dressed up like fancy-ball ushers hung from the walls. Someone had worked hard to make the room a shrine to the manly art of legalized murder, but it looked like the haunted house set of an Abbott and Costello movie.

  Near the fireplace was a billiard size table. The green-and-brown baize top swarmed with hundreds of tin soldiers. Bending over the table was a slender man wearing a gray herringbone tweed jacket that wasn’t half as natty as mine. He turned and smiled, then walked smartly over to me, and giving a quiet click of his heels, he shook my hand. His bony grip was strong. He looked about sixty but was probably ten years older. His silver hair was cropped Prussian close to a long firm-jawed Nordic head. His thin lips were as bloodless as two strips of liver. His face was all hard planes and angles, not a soft or curving line on it, like one of those ice sculptures they chisel for winter carnivals. If he stood near a stove long enough, he’d simply melt.

  He cold blue eyes focused on a spot six inches behind my head. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Socarides. Please have a seat. These Cape Cod spring days still have a nip of winter in them, don’t they. How about some brandy?” It was a cultivated voice, not much louder than a whisper, with no particular regional accent I could place. I was wondering why everybody in the place spoke in a whisper. And why I wanted to do the same.

  Winston Prayerly poured us two snifters of Grand Marnier. “Thank you,” Walther said, “that will be all.” The valet disappeared, quickly and quietly. Walther lifted his brandy. “To your health.” We said in facing leather chairs, sipping the brandy in appreciative silence. The only sound was the snapping of the fire. Walther put the glass down on a side table. “You’re probably wondering how I happened to call you.”

  It had crossed my mind. People who live on Merrill’s Island don’t exactly ring my phone off the hook.

  “Most of my cases are referrals,” I said, which was true, because I don’t advertise.

  “Just so. You were recommended to me by Leonard Wilson. He said your methods were unconventional, but they worked.”

  Leonard Wilson was my old yachting buddy. Cape Cod has a lot of rich people like Wilson who are always looking for a free deckhand. Last summer an acquaintance asked me to crew in a sailboat race. The forty-nine-foot sloop was owned by Leonard Wilson. We lost the race, but Wilson was grateful and bought drinks for us at the yacht club. Over gin and tonics Wilson told me he owned a large retail operation near Boston and that someone at his warehouse was stealing him blind. I offered my services as a private cop, went in undercover, studied the system, and recommended places where he could plug the leaks. Then I got lucky. The thief spotted my cop’s flat feet and thought I needed a body to match. He tried to bury me under a pile of wooden crates. That was his first mistake. Missing me was his second. I get excited when people try to make me short and wide. I came up swinging and he spent a few days in the hospital nursing a broken jaw and three cracked ribs. With him out of the picture, things just sort of fell into place and the pilferage stopped.

  Walther was saying, “I took the liberty of doing some further checking. I’m very careful about whom I work with.” A pile of manila folders sat on the table next to his brandy. He took the top folder and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside was a résumé I could have written myself. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, studied Greek and Roman classics at Boston University, dropped out to join the Marines in Vietnam, did a stint with the Boston Police Department, now a fisherman and part-time private cop.

  The most interesting item was an eight-by-ten color photograph. It showed a dark-haired guy with olive skin and a droopy mustache on the deck of Sam’s boat pitch-forking cod into the dockside conveyor bucket. The picture of me was taken by someone standing on the fish-per observation platform.