Death of a Righteous Gentile
by
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What I was wondering now, though, was where the hell Walt was. It wasn't like Walt to leave his poles untended like this. Maybe he's in the can, I thought. There were four portable latrines further along the pier, two on each side. That's where he must be. I pushed my bike another fifty yards and stopped between the latrine huts.
“Hey, Walt!” I called out.
No answer, only the lapping of the water on the pilings below.
“Hey, Walt, you old fart!” I yelled louder. “Get your Polish ass out of there.!”
Still no answer.
I propped my bike on its kickstand. Christ! You never know what might have happened to a man in his seventies. Had a stroke, a heart attack, who knows? I knocked on the tin door of the first one, then opened it. Nothing except flies and stink. I did the same thing with the other three, with the same result. I was beginning to worry. I was also beginning to get chilled. The dampness was penetrating my sweat suit. Then it hit me: the bait net! It was missing from the cart. Walt must be somewhere at the end of the pier dipping for bait.
To warm up, I got up on my bike and pumped to the end of the pier, parking the bike against the wire fence in front of the restaurant. To the left is a narrow passageway between the wire fence and a small building that serves as a snack shop and ticket office for the charter-fishing boats that call at the pier. There was nobody at the ticket office and there wouldn't be for another hour. The first sport fishing boat, the Enterprise, wasn't due here until eight o'clock.
I jogged along the side of the restaurant and came out at the end of the pier, expecting to see Walt leaning over the rail pulling his net up. No Walt. Just a couple of gray and white gulls perching on the rail looking warily at me. The only sound under the dim yellowish glow from the lights was the washing of the incoming tide against the pilings. Normally from here you can see the oil platforms about half a mile out. On a clear day you can see Catalina Island. Today, all I could see was fog. It had lost its romantic appeal to me by now; a soggy feeling of dread was beginning to seep into my gut. I hesitated before passing through the break in the wooden fence, afraid of what I might find on the other side facing the open water. I didn't know I was holding my breath until I let it out with a whoosh at finding the space between the fence and the rail empty.
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About the Book
When recently divorced Josh Greer, a somewhat opinionated and disillusioned former English instructor, takes his usual morning bike ride to the fog-bound Seal Beach pier, he rides into a mystery that will alter the course of his life, a mystery ranging in time from the Polish concentration camps of WW II to 1986, the “current” time for Josh in this story, and geographically from the Long Beach area to Baja California and back. Through his involvement with horrors of the past and contemporary crime, Josh finds a new love, suffers great loss, and achieves his ambition for changing his career.
About the Author
Born in England, the author has lived most of his life in California. He has written four mysteries, one of which – Strange Ways to Sacred Places – has already been published by Author House, and he is now writing his fifth. He is also working on a projected five volume fictional memoir about his growing up in England during WW II. Having finished two volumes, he is now working on the third.
Mr. Lackman lives with his wife in Southern California, reading, writing, and tending his flower garden; he also continues to ride his bike each day along the river channel.