Death Off Santa Catalina – Short Story

The book lulled me to sleep, and my dreams led me back to the book. 

Natalie was struggling in the water, grasping at the starboard side to ‘the Splendour’. Some part of my semi-lucid state knew that it was my conscience tormenting me. Natalie was dragged underwater. I couldn’t bear to watch that again. I dived off the deck and into the water to save her, hook Natalie in my arms and climb us both back onboard. Then sail this blasted yacht away from Santa Catalina and back to Long Beach, taking Natalie away from Robert forever. I only managed to pull myself awake. Conscious again, the sight of my bedroom was barely more palatable. The sheets were soaked in sweat. Damp as a wet deck. My ribcage was red where the weight of guilt-ridden sleep had branded me. My throat was dry from the perspiration. I ran my fingers across the duvet beside me, half expecting to find my wife’s lithe figure beneath it. Then I groggily recalled that she had moved in with her divorce attorney. From separate beds to separate houses in three months. Instead, my hand ran across the metallic frame of my phone. I must have knocked out my AirPods as the booming voice of Robert emanated from the Audible app:

After the police boat took away Natalie’s corpse, I noticed the dinghy was floating free alongside the Splendour. I sighed and tied it back to the railings. As if the tragic and sudden death of my wife wasn’t bad enough, I had to contend with the everyday responsibilities of sailing. Then I started to weep. Grief creeps up on you in these ordinary moments.

My wife had a new lover to keep her warm at night. I had Robert’s self-serving autobiography, Death Off Santa Catalina, to keep me company. I paused it and staggered to the toilet. After my bladder relaxed I put my lips around the sink faucet and rehydrated. My phone was pinging with notifications. I walked back to it and read an update I’d been expecting for weeks. The LA Times was reporting that Robert had been taken in for questioning under police caution. Thirty years after Natalie’s death and he was a suspect again, based on new and as yet undisclosed evidence. My phone was also telling me it was 3:26 am. No chance of getting back to sleep tonight, besides I wanted to get a march on things. I threw on my work clothes and headed out to the Subaru. I was on the Freeway in ten minutes. Once again, I had Robert’s book for company. My friends told me I was obsessed with this book. “Why don’t you read the case files?” they asked in exasperation. “This’ll tell me if he’s guilty or not” I replied in earnest.

I’ve had my indiscretions, but that didn’t mean Natalie’s feelings for Christopher didn’t hurt. The fact that they had chemistry was indisputable, they were flirting before my eyes the night that she died. Whether it ever amounted to anything more than that I will never discover. Christopher is too much of a gentleman to brag, and I don’t want to know. I have forgiven Natalie as what’s done is done.

Natalie had been flirting openly on Robert’s yacht the Splendour that night with her latest co-star Christopher. He was younger and hotter, physically and career-wise, than Robert. They were tactile onscreen and off. Did she have any genuine feelings for him? It was one of the biggest mysteries of the entire affair. But Christopher felt that Robert had suffered enough and never commented on the events of that night other than in his official police statement. Perhaps he felt guilt or resented the way Natalie had used him for revenge on her straying husband.

Sirens blared behind me. Police lights in my rear-view. An LAPD Squad Car had been tailing me. The empty roads and my addiction to the audiobook, Robert’s oh so self-serving audiobook, had let me slip the car into ninety. I pulled over for the cop. Handed over my license and registration at his request and denied I had been drinking.

“You smell of alcohol.”

“That was from yesterday,” I replied truthfully.

“When did you last have a drink?”

“Just before bed” I answered as concisely as possible.

Finally he prised it out of me. I admitted that my last drink had been four hours ago. He didn’t buy the fact that I had been to bed since then was in any way a sobering factor. The next thing I knew he asked me to depart my car and I failed a breathalyser test. Then I was in the back of the police vehicle in handcuffs, under arrest for DUI.

The LA County Jail system is something I have got to know well over the years, although I didn’t recognise any of the staff working the graveyard shift. The booking officer rolled off a series of questions with a sort of bored officialdom that comes with cops who never rise above uniform rank.

“Profession?”

“Self-employed.”

“You run your own business?” he stared with incredulity at my sorry state.

“I’ve only got one client,” I shrugged.

“Do you have anything to say before we take you into custody?”

“This is all a big misunderstanding. Yesterday I was drunk, today I’m sober, and I only drifted above the limit because I was listening to the audiobook Death off Santa Catalina.”

“Hah, otherwise titled How I Murdered My Wife and Almost Got Away with It.”

The arresting officer took me to a cell. I tried my luck with Robert. Prisoners are like everyone else in LA. They always want to know the local celebrity gossip, and LA County was the Chateau Marmont of Jails. Over the years it had played host to a number of star names who possessed varying degrees of talent. Everyone from Charles Manson to OJ Simpson, James Ellroy and Hugh Grant.

“Where are you keeping him anyway?”

“Who?” he replied, nonplussed.

“You know.”

“He’s in Interrogation Room One spilling his guts out.”

He unlocked the door to my cell and swung it open. I was relieved to see I would be alone. Perfect for work.

“Say, how about something to read?”

“I’ll get you the yellow tub.”

I smiled. They still kept all of the paperbacks in a yellow tub they would pass from cell to cell.

“Don’t bother. I’m only interested in one – Death off Santa Catalina.”

He looked at me quizzically, “Do you want a signed copy?”

“Do you have it or not?”

“This isn’t a lending library. We have Celebrate Recovery literature from the local church, if you’re interested.”

Ugh, no thank you. I’d tried God and sobriety once, and it led me straight back to the Devil and a bottle.

“Come on, I was listening to the audiobook when you picked me up. Unless you’re prepared to give my phone back, I really need a copy.”

“Not a chance. Get in.” He pursed his lips before closing the cell door. I stood there inanimate, unsure as to where we had left things. Sure enough, within a few minutes I heard the keys jangling as they slid into the lock.

“You’re in luck,” he said, throwing a paperback book onto my bunk and slamming the door shut in a single motion. He hadn’t let me down. It was Death off Santa Catalina in all its revised, expanded and unexpurgated glory.

I sat down to study it. The next few hours flew by. Give a researcher a study full of books and a free day and he’ll get almost nothing done, but put him in a damp cell with a single tome and it sharpens his reading skills wonderfully.

I scanned and skim read the exposition until I got to the key passages:

I went to bed angry that night. Natalie said she’d join me later. A dull recurring thud interrupted my sleep. I woke up panicked, thinking it was a bedframe groaning under the weight of two lovers’ tryst. Natalie was not beside me. I heard footsteps. Was she returning to the marital bed after an assignation with Christopher?

“Enjoying it are you?”

I was so engrossed in the book that I hadn’t noticed the cell door had opened and the officer who had brought the book was checking up on me.

“It’s not a question of pleasure. I have to know.”

“Well, if you ask me, he’s innocent.”

“Your colleague back there might disagree with that,” I replied, thinking of the Booking officer’s smartass remark. 

“Why would he kill her? Because she was having an affair with that other actor. That would never fly in court.” He shook his head. “No, those Hollywood types are always having affairs.”

“The prosecution would only need to prove that Robert killed her,” I replied delicately, making sure I wasn’t challenging his dominance. “Motive makes for a compelling argument, but it’s not essential for a conviction. Besides, I don’t think they were having an affair.”

“What” he said incredulously, desperate to school me the way I had him. “The way they were behaving that night.”

“Maybe Natalie just liked the attention.”

He slammed the cell door shut, convinced I was so stupid that the matter was beyond debating. I didn’t tell him my argument was based on reason and the law. Christopher had been interviewed by police officers. He could be subpoenaed and cross-examined under oath. He wasn’t going to risk a perjury conviction just to hide an adulterous relationship. Like Robert, he was a married man, and his playfulness with Natalie could best be described as ill-judged. What then had Robert heard that night which he had mistaken for an amorous encounter? I returned to the book for answers.

I crept out of my cabin and tiptoed on the deck, half expecting to follow an audible trail of sensuous moans and catch Natalie and Christopher in flagrante delicto. Years later, my therapist told me that I was in the grip on a cuck fantasy. Half fearing what I’d find, half desiring it to be true.

I slammed the book shut. Robert wrote with surprising candour. He didn’t dare hire a ghost-writer to compose these sections for him in case he let something slip. Natalie’s visage invaded my thoughts. Her brown eyes were so penetrating that it was almost hard to take in her beauty as you knew she was staring directly into your soul and I felt the urge to look away and deny her that privilege. Read on, I told myself, find out what happened, forget about how you feel about her. I reopened the book; found the passage I was at and reread a few sentences before leading up to the climax.

I was at the height of a violent sexual anticipation when I found her, and she had never been more beautiful. That creamy skin and penetrating eyes…

You fucker Robert, that’s how I described her.

…staring up and through me. The water had made her more pale than usual, I thought. Then I realised it was the discoloration of death. The sea had already claimed her. She was a beautiful corpse.

I raced through the next few pages. Robert’s mourning process was of no interest to me. The hypocrisy was sickening even by Hollywood standards. It was the last page to which I turned.

A few years later, when the allegations had ceased but my career could not be resurrected, I had an epiphany as to what had lured Natalie into the water that night. Remember, she was always terrified of water. Getting her onto the Splendour was hard work in itself. In fact, the first time she had betrayed me had been in water, during her love scene with Warren in that wretched film where they had been intimate off a riverbank (Splendour in the Grass). Yes, that doesn’t count I hear you say, to which I would reply that they were sleeping together off camera as well. My cuckolds’ horns felt a bit lighter with the knowledge that filming that scene had terrified her. Four crew members had waded into the river in case, Heaven forfend, she slipped and drowned in three feet of water. Now, on the night she betrayed me again with Christopher, the banging had been the dinghy which I had neglected to tie up and was bouncing against the hull. This had disturbed Natalie in the night, and she had wandered out half-drunk to tie it, lost her footing and fell into the water. She couldn’t swim but managed to doggy paddle a little. But in her panic, and wearing a nightgown that had become heavy with water, she was pulled under and drowned. How had I not noticed it when I tied up the dinghy the following morning?

The book ended here, and Robert wanted the reader to believe the mystery was solved. I tossed it on the bunk. My reading of it said that this was Robert’s confessional, but it wasn’t admissible. 

Item: he tries to act magnanimous about Natalie and Christopher, claiming that he didn’t know or care anymore whether they had an affair. He may no longer care but he would have known. Christopher formally denied a sexual relationship in his police interview, a transcript of which would have become available to Robert through his defence attorney. 

Fact: his last words on Natalie, on the very last page, reiterate her adultery with her former co-star Warren. Not so forgiving of him and proof as to how he remembered her, no tribute to her talent or testament to her beauty. Natalie had admitted the affair with Warren, so she was already an adulteress in Robert’s eyes by the time she got on the Splendour that night, regardless of whether her playfulness around Christopher was merely flirtation. Robert had been so obsessed with her betrayal that he named the Splendour after the film Natalie starred in with Warren and in which the affair took place. 

Hypothesis: why doesn’t he mention Natalie screaming for help once she fell into the water? If his half-asleep hearing is attentive enough to hear the dinghy bouncing and Natalie walking barefoot to attend to it, then surely, he could hear her terrified screams. A coroner will tell you that drowning is the most painful way to die. Your internal organs explode one by one. People get vocal with that sort of pain. Why didn’t she climb on to the dinghy she had tried to tie up? The only answer would be that someone ignored her screams and prevented her from climbing onto the dinghy. 

Falsification: there was a big hole in the domestic homicide theory. Natalie looked beautiful in death as even Robert conceded. Jealous husbands slice off breasts and blow holes in their wives faces. They eliminate a woman’s sexual expression so she cannot gift it to anyone else but them. I pictured Robert untying the dinghy and hoping the noise would disturb Natalie in the night. Knowing her to be a light sleeper, under the influence of alcohol, and panicky near water he could let the rest just work out for him. He could ignore her screams and use a barge pole to prevent her from boarding the dinghy. Pity the prosecutor who tried to sell that to twelve jurors. A judge might dismiss the charges or direct the jury to acquit. But the rage element was missing from my hypothesis. When your wife has been unfaithful you don’t plan your revenge as though you’re outlining a Perry Mason novel. You shout and scream and, if you’re an abuser, throw punches. Then it came to me. Earlier in the book, Robert had complained about the domestic chore of tying up the dinghy the following morning. He wasn’t really complaining, he was gloating. He said her corpse looked beautiful in the water. He was alluding to the first betrayal with Warren in the water, preserved forever on film. A humiliation in aspic. He had saved his rage for the page, and revealed his revenge on Natalie for all those who came looking.

I was confident that I had solved the mystery but not in the way Robert intended, or if he did, he never expected it would get him hauled before the LAPD again. The cell door opened, and a plain-clothes detective walked in. It was a woman I recognized.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That traffic cop didn’t know who you were.”

“That’s alright.”

“We’ll get you discharged. What are you going to do now?”

“What time is it?”

“Coming up to nine” she checked her watch to make sure there was no mistake. “Yeah nine.”

“Then I’ll do what everyone else does at nine in the morning – start my working day.”

I got to my feet and handed her Death off Santa Catalina. “Is that why you’re holding him? Your new information is what he blabbed out in that book.”

“You’ll know soon enough” she replied, flicking through a few pages,

“Right, get me out of here.”

I walked out of the cell, and rather than bother with booking out, I headed straight down the corridor and into Interrogation Room One. Robert sat there, aging and exhausted. He looked like a ghost who was pleased to see me, as though I would take him back to the spirit world where none of these earthly things mattered. Two detectives sat opposite him and looked up to acknowledge my presence. I pulled up a chair and sat next to Robert.

“Firstly, my client is completely innocent of these reheated thirty-year-old charges,” I said, nodding towards Robert. “And more importantly, why has he been denied access to his attorney throughout the night?”

It was the book that brought me here. A confessional that’s not admissible. I squeezed Robert’s hand. The frail old ladykiller managed a weak smile.

“I’ll have you out of here in no time” I assured him.

The End