My first interview was on the docks at the Cabrillo Marina in San Pedro. I always liked coming down this way but rarely did. I didn't know why. It was one of those things you forget about until you do it again and then you remember that you like it. The first time I arrived I was a sixteen-year-old runaway. I made my way down to the Pedro docks and spent my days getting tattooed and watching the tuna boats come in. I spent my nights sleeping in an unlocked towboat called Rosebud. Until a harbormaster caught me and I was sent back to the foster home, the words Hold Fast tattooed across my knuckles.

Cabrillo Marina was newer than that memory. These weren't the working docks where I had ended up so many years before. Cabrillo Marina provided dockage for pleasure craft. The masts of a hundred sailboats poked up behind its locked gates like a forest after a wildfire. Beyond these were rows of power yachts, many in the millions of dollars in value. Some not. Buddy Lockridge's boat was not a floating castle. Lockridge, who Graciela McCaleb told me was her husband's charter partner and closest friend at the end, lived on a thirty-two-foot sailboat that looked like it had the contents of a sixty-footer on its deck. It was a junker, not by virtue of the boat itself but by how it was cared for. If Lockridge had lived in a house it would've had cars on blocks in the yard and walls of stacked newspapers inside.

He had buzzed me in at the gate and emerged from the cabin wearing shorts, sandals and a T-shirt worn and washed so many times the inscription across the chest was unreadable. Graciela had called him ahead of time. He knew I wanted to talk to him but not the exact reason why.

"So," he said as he stepped off the boat onto the dock. "Graciela said you are looking into Terry's death. Is this like an insurance thing or something?"

"Yes, you could say that."

"You like a private eye or something?"