"I'm fuckin' bushed, man."

"Got anything to drink?" I ask.

Burns stares heavily at me.

"Relax, Jay. I'll get it myself." I squeeze past him toward the refrigerator. The cabin is cramped and rank. A cold beer takes the sour burn out of my throat.

Burns says, "These questions, like I tole you, Cleo would be the one to say. She could help you."

"That wreck you guys were diving on—what kind of plane was it? Cleo wasn't sure."

To signal his annoyance, Burns emits a rumbling gastric grunt. "DC-6," he says, cigarette bobbing.

"She said it was a drug plane."

"Twenty years ago, sport. Now it's Disneyland for lobsters." Burns is bracing himself upright on the cabin steps because he doesn't want to sit down again until I'm gone. He figures if he stands there long enough, I'll take the hint.

"Did you see Jimmy swimming around the wreck?"

"The plane's in pieces, man."

"Yes, Cleo told me. You didn't see Jimmy at all?"

Burns says, "We dove off the boat together. He went one way, I went the other."

"How was visibility?"

"Sucko. The wind blew twenty all night long so the bottom got churned to hell." Burns digs a beer from the refrigerator. From his body language it's obvious he's lost his patience, and possibly his temper.

For deterrence I take out my notebook, which Burns regards with a mixture of disgust and apprehension.

"Weird," I remark, as if to myself.

"What?" Burns strains to see what I'm writing.

"A twenty-knot wind all night long in August," I say. "Isn't that pretty unusual for the Bahamas?"

Jay Burns draws on his beer and shrugs.

"Yet it was glassy calm," I say, "the next day when you guys went out."

"That's the islands for ya."

"So the last time you saw Jimmy alive was right after you jumped in the water."

"The tail of the plane is, like, fifty yards from the nose section. Every now and then I could see bubbles but that was it. The bottom was all muddied up, like I tole you."

"Jay, what do you think happened down there?"

"Me?"

The telltale stall. Burns is trying to roust his brain and bear down. He's trying to avoid saying something that might contradict what he told the Bahamian authorities, or what Cleo told me. His fixed, furrowed expression is that of a drunk trying to wobble his way through a roadside sobriety test.

I nudge him along. "Jay, it's hard to understand. Jimmy was an experienced diver—"

"What're you tryin' to say? Anybody can swim off and get lost. It happens," he says. "The cops in Nassau, they said they see it all the time. He coulda used up his tank and had a heart attack on the way to the top. Who knows."

"I suppose. But it just seems weird."

Burns scowls. "You fuckin' people are all alike. Stirring up shit—Jesus, a man's dead. My best friend! Cleo's husband! He's dead and here you're tryin' to make some goddamn mystery out of it, just to sell papers."

I should inform Mr. Burns that the days are long gone when headlines sold significant numbers of newspapers; that the serious money comes from home subscriptions, not rack sales. I should tell him that most of the shrill tabloids have died off, and that the predominant tone of modern American journalism is strenuously tepid and deferential.

But I can't explain any of this to Jay Burns because he's suddenly seized me in a clinch and we're caroming from one side of the cabin to the other, literally rocking the boat. He outweighs me by at least fifty pounds, but luckily—being loaded to the gills—he is neither tireless nor exceptionally nimble. I still remember a few basic wrestling moves from high school and so, in two quick motions, I'm able to twist free and dump Jay Burns on his fat ass. Kicking out with both feet, he manages to nail me in the shins and I topple backward, snapping the door off the head.

Burns struggles to rise, making it all the way to one knee before I jump him. This time I drive an elbow into his nose and he stays down, slobbering blood like a gutshot boar. I sprawl on his chest, plant a knee in his groin and pin both arms over his head.

Lowering my face to his, I say: "Oh, Jay?"

"Huhhggnn."

"You hear me?"

Rage has fled from his eyes. All he wants now is to breathe without choking on viscous fluids.

"How old are you, Jay?"

"Wha-uh?"

"Simple question. How old?"

Burns sniffs to clear bubbles of blood from his nostrils. "Forty," he says thickly.

"That's awful young. Jay, I'm talking to you."

"Yeah, what?"

I point out that Kafka didn't make it to his forty-first birthday. Burns blinks quizzically. "Who's that?"

"Franz Kafka, a very important writer. Died before he got famous."

"What'd he write—songs?"

"No, Jay. Books and stories. He was an existentialist."

"I think you busted my fuckin' nose."

"Guess who else checked out on the big four-oh? Edgar Allan Poe."

"Him I heard of," Burns says.

"Raving like a cuckoo bird, he was. No one knows what happened there. When's your birthday?"

"October."

"It pains me, Jay, to think you've had more time on this planet than John Lennon. Does that seem right?"

"Lennon?" Finally Burns looks worried. "He was forty when that asshole shot him?"

"Yep," I say. "Same as you."

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"I wish I didn't, Jay, I swear to God. I wish I could flush it out of my skull. Did you kill Jimmy Stoma?"

"No!" His head lifts off the floor and his red-rimmed eyes go wide.

"Did Cleo do it?"

"No way," Burns says, but with less vehemence. He's giving me a look I've seen many times before. Orrin Van Gelder looked at me the same way during our first interview, when he was trying to figure out precisely how much I knew.

Jay Burns, stoned keyboardist, is wondering the same thing.

"Let me up," he says. Shortly he won't need my permission; he's rallying fast, shaking off the cobwebs.

"What was the name of this boat," I ask, "before Jimmy married Cleo?"

Burns, squirming in my grip, manages a chuckle. "Floating Hospice,"he says.

"No kidding. That's odd."

"Odd how?" he says irritably. "Lemme up, goddammit."

"Odd that a guy who wanted to forget about the music business would name a boat after one of his albums."

"Man, you don't know what the fuck you're talkin' about. Who said Jimmy was turned off on the business?"

"His wife."

"Oh."

"And she would know, right? You said so yourself."

Before Jay Burns can buck me off, I get up. He allows me to help him to his feet, and reciprocates by retrieving my notebook from the cluttered floor. His ponytail has come undone and his oily pewter hair hangs crimped and lank. I hand him a business card listing my direct number at the Union-Register.

"What for?"

"In case you think of anything else you want to say about Jimmy."

"Doubtful," Burns says, though he pockets the card. "Sorry I went postal, man. It's been a shitty week."

"That's okay. I'm sorry about your nose."

"What a fucked-up way to get in Rolling Stone–the 'ex-Slut Puppy' who went on Jimmy Stoma's last scuba dive." Burns spits in the galley sink. "Ten years it's been since they even mentioned my name."

We go outside to the cockpit, stepping into a blessedly fresh breeze. On the dock a snow-white heron uncoils his neck in anticipation of a handout.

Burns says, "That's Steve. Jimmy named him after Tyler on account of his skinny legs."

"Tell me about Jimmy's solo project."

"How'd you—?" Then, scrambling: "Oh, the 'album.' It wasn't nowhere near finished—years and years he's been screwin' with that damn thing down in Exuma. He built a studio in the beach house but he never puts in more'n a couple hours. Not with all that pretty blue agua.Jimmy just about lives on this boat."