The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin by Michael Craven Page B

tropical fish business. Have you? What does that even mean? Owning an aquarium store? Being one of those guys in really short running shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, with a parrot on his shoulder and a station wagon out back with a bunch of nets and shit in it? Or does it mean breeding and selling expensive fish to weirdo fish people and Bond villains? No clue. But if anything stuck out, that stuck out. Right? That’s something lurking on the edge of this story. So why not look into it.
    Right?

14
    I produced the card that Craig Helton had given me just a couple of hours ago. I dialed the number. He answered.
    â€œI didn’t think you’d call me so quickly,” he said, surprised.
    â€œI didn’t either. Have a question, though.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œYou said Keaton went into the tropical fish business. Can you tell me a little more about that? What does that mean, exactly?”
    Craig Helton laughed. “I know. Pretty out there, right? Truth is, I don’t know that much about it. It was after the bar; we weren’t speaking. But I’ll tell you what I know.”
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œIt was some kind of high-end tropical fish business. Where people spend a lot of money for certain kinds of fish. Not fish you can buy in just a regular old pet store or aquarium place or whatever. That’s really all I know. Every time I heard anything about it, I just said, ‘Please stop, I don’t care.’ But like I said, I heard it didn’t work out. Keaton left the business, skipped out on them or something. Shocking.”
    â€œDid you ever hear who the people were that he was working with? Or did the company have a name that you remember?”
    â€œNever heard anything about the people. But the company, yeah. What was it called? Ugh. I put it out of my mind. Ugh. Man. I can’t remember.” And then he said, “Let me think. My wife might remember. I’ll figure it out and call you back.”
    â€œThank you,” I said.
    We hung up.
    I started looking around the web, doing a cursory investigation into expensive tropical fish. To get my head around what this business might have been about. And, man, I learned quickly that there are indeed some expensive fish out there. With some wild names to boot.
    The clarion angelfish. Indigenous to islands off the coast of Mexico. Goes for anywhere from twenty-five hundred to seven thousand dollars a pop. I looked at a picture of one. It was striking, quite beautiful, really. Flat and disk-shaped, bright orange, and sort of see-through, with vertical indigo-blue stripes down its face and side.
    The Australian flathead perch. Not as beautiful as the clarion angelfish, to my eye, but certainly interestinglooking. Also orange, but not as bright. This one was long, sleek, skinny, minnowlike, with white horizontal stripes rimmed in black. Five thousand bucks.
    And look at this. Wow, really ? The freshwater polka-dot stingray. A black Taiwanese stingray, two little alien eyes on the top of its head, covered in bright white circles, polka dots, of various sizes. One hundred thousand dollars. For one.
    And . . . holy shit, you have got to be kidding me. Looks like this might be the top dog. The platinum arowana. Valued at almost four hundred thousand dollars. A big fish compared to the others, looks like two feet long or so. And all white, a bright, glowing white, all over. With a white iris around a yellow eye. I thought: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an all-white fish. And then I saw why. There are green, red, silver arowana, and other colors too, found in waters off Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. But to be white, all white, means a genetic mutation. A rarity. A mistake. I found a video of a platinum arowana moving slowly through a massive aquarium. It had a little bit of an underbite and a slightly smooshed face. Because of the all-white body and the translucent white fins, it blurred a bit as it