Single Jeopardy by Gene Grossman

I’ll watch his slip for him while he’s gone, and give him my cell phone number in case he runs into trouble on the way there or back. Watching an empty slip seems like an empty promise, but if you know someone’s boat will be returning at an approximate time of the day, you can make sure that people who bring their boats over to visit friends on the dock are not in the slip when the rightful slip tenant returns from a trip.
    Sunday morning, he leaves and I start watching.
    It’s doubtful that the doc is having a good trip over to the island. I’ve been told that Californian trawler of his only does about nine miles an hour, and it’s almost forty-five miles from our dock to Avalon, making it at least a five-hour trip if the wind and current are with you. It’s now about three hours after he left, and the skies are getting dark, the wind is coming up, and pretty soon I’m sure the rain will start. The wind is coming out of the North, so it’s not likely the doc turned around to return, because then he would have been slowly going against the wind and current. He’ll probably ride it out and reach the island late in the afternoon.
    Just before dinner I turn on the early evening news broadcast. L. Martin recently installed a new forty-two-inch high-definition flat-panel plasma television set, so watching TV has just become a new experience for me. As I’m potchkying around in the galley, a familiar-sounding voice on the news catches my ear. I turn to the television, and there she is, my ex-wife. She looks like she’s lost almost two- hundred non-essential pounds: Me! Super-imposed on the bottom of the screen under her face is “Deputy District Attorney Myra Scot.” I guess they just didn’t have room on the screen to include the last name we shared. The purpose of her appearance is to confidently state that the authorities expect to make an arrest soon in the murder of that Marina del Rey Chinese restaurant owner.
    She explains how their investigation is focusing on members of an Asian gambling syndicate involved in the casinos that are so prevalent in neighboring cities of Inglewood and Gardena. They don’t have roulette or Vegas-style blackjack, but they do have lots of card games and other gaming methods that closely resemble what you can do in Las Vegas, which is lose your money quickly. A very high percentage of their customers are Asian. Most of the others come in once a month, cigarette in mouth, both hands on their walkers, and social security money in hand. These local card casinos rarely attract out of town tourists. Instead, they just cannibalize the local economy, all in the cause of paying taxes to support schools, so that the future graduates can wind up spending their social security money in the casinos.
    One apparently strange thing about her announcement that doesn’t quite compute is that it sounds wrong. I’ve done some investigating into the competing restaurants’ owner Robert Palmer, and he looks more like a suspect than some Asian gang. If Myra’s office is investigating the gang, it’s a good bet they’re wasting their time, because they don’t have a very good track record for crime solving. It would be a lot better if they left it to the Culver City Police, who are the primaries on this case, as indicated by that police report faxed to me. I guess this is just another case of the D.A.’s office trying to showboat for headlines. I turned all of my reports over to Mel’s office and I’m sure they finally reached the Culver City detective assigned to the case.
    For some time now I’ve owned a DVD entitled Celestial Navigation for the Complete Idiot. It was a gift from a friend of mine and notwithstanding the title, it really does a good job of reviewing the techniques of Coastal Piloting and then explaining in plain English the principles of celestial navigation, what a sextant measures, and how to navigate around the world.
    Any guy like George Clooney, who is interested in