Читать книгу Huckleberry Finished: - Livia J Washburn - Страница 12

Mark must have seen the worried look on my face as I closed my cell phone and slipped it back into my purse. “Problem?” he asked. “Something about your tour?”

“I don’t know.” I picked up my glass and threw back the rest of the champagne. Luckily there wasn’t much of it left, or I might have choked on it. “That was Captain Williams. You know him?”

“I’ve met him a couple of times. I’m new at the job of playing Mark Twain, remember? I don’t know any of the crew all that well yet.”

“When you talked to him, did the captain strike you as the sort of fella who’d get worked up over something if it wasn’t important?”

“Not at all,” Mark said, not hesitating a bit. “He seemed very calm and levelheaded to me.”

There went my idea that maybe the captain wanted to fuss at me because one of my clients littered the deck or something like that. Calm and levelheaded meant that Williams wouldn’t be sending the head of security to fetch me unless something important had happened.

“If there’s anything I can do to help…” Mark went on.

I didn’t want to burden him with my problems. Besides, I didn’t even know yet what the problem was. So I shook my head and said, “No, that’s all right. But I appreciate the offer from a famous man like Mark Twain.”

Just then, Logan Rafferty came into the salon. He moved with a brisk efficiency that said while he wasn’t hurrying, he wasn’t wasting any time, either. He spotted me and started across the salon toward me.

I put my hand on the sleeve of Mark’s white coat for a second and said, “Maybe I’ll see you later. Congratulations again on your performance.”

Rafferty wore a pretty grim expression as I went to meet him. “Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “Please come with me.”

He kept his voice pitched low. I could tell that he didn’t want to attract any more attention than he had to. That was sort of difficult to do, though, as big and tough-looking as he was.

“Where are we going?” I asked as we started toward the door of the salon.

“Captain Williams will explain everything to you.” He paused, then added, “And you’ve got some explaining to do, too.”

“Hey, I may be a redhead, but I’m not Lucy Ricardo.”

He didn’t as much as grunt. I don’t know if he didn’t get the reference, or if he just didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Of course, the comment wasn’t really that funny to begin with, I told myself.

I expected Rafferty to take me up to the pilothouse, since that’s where Captain Williams would normally be. Instead, when we reached the stairway, he headed down toward the main deck. But he didn’t stop there. He opened a door and revealed some stairs that led below decks. Down there was the belly of the boat, the engine room and the boilers and all the other things that made the Southern Belle go.

“Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly feeling even more nervous than I was before. “Are you sure Captain Williams is down here?”

“He’s waiting for us,” Rafferty said.

Short of turning and running, which he hadn’t really given me any reason to do, my only other option seemed to be to follow him down those stairs. With plenty of misgivings, I did so.

Since the boat was docked, the main engines were off, but I could still hear the rumble of the generators that provided electricity. The riverboats in Mark Twain’s time hadn’t been equipped like that, of course, but there were only so many creature comforts modern tourists would give up in the name of authenticity. Folks wanted to be able to flip a switch and have lights and air-conditioning.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Rafferty led me along a narrow, metal-walled corridor. We turned a couple of times and then went around a corner to see several men standing in front of a small door set into the wall. The door was partially open, but I couldn’t see through it because of the man who stood in front of it.

He was tall and slender—lean was actually more like it—and wore a white uniform with gold braid on it. A black cap sat on his head. He was in his sixties, I estimated, based on his white hair and the weathered look of his face. Dark eyes stabbed at me as he snapped, “Ms. Dickinson?”

I recognized his voice. “Captain?”

“That’s right. I’m Captain L. B. Williams. You’re the head of Dickinson Literary Tours?”

“Yes, sir, I am. If you don’t mind, can I ask what this is all about?”

Evidently I couldn’t, because he didn’t answer me. Instead he asked another question of his own.

“A man named Ben Webster booked passage on the Southern Belle through your agency?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Dickinson, but Mr. Webster is dead.”

In the back of my mind, I’d been halfway expecting that. The other half had been worried that Webster had done something to damage the boat. So I felt both relief and shock, mostly shock, at the news he was dead.

Then it was all shock as Captain Williams stepped aside so that I could see through the partially open door into what was evidently a storage closet of some sort. The only thing stored in there now was a body. Somebody had crammed Ben Webster into the locker, doubling up his arms and legs so that he would fit. No way he could have gotten in there like that himself, I thought.

He hadn’t broken his own neck, either. I could tell by the odd angle of his head that his neck was broken. He hadn’t committed suicide. He hadn’t tried to hide in the locker and accidentally killed himself.

No, Ben Webster had been murdered, sure as anything, I thought.

“You seem to be taking this awfully calmly, Ms. Dickinson,” Williams commented. “Did you already know that Mr. Webster was dead?”

I opened my mouth to tell him that no, the only reason I was able to handle this catastrophe without falling apart was that I had a little experience with murder, from the time Luke and I took a tour group to the plantation.

But I never got the words out, because it suddenly didn’t matter that I had seen murder victims before. I hadn’t seen this murder victim. I hadn’t looked into Ben Webster’s wide, staring eyes that no longer saw anything, or noted that the tip of his tongue stuck out a little between his lips, or thought about how, if rigor mortis had already set in, whoever took him out of the locker might have to break his arms and legs just to straighten him out again. All of that was new, and it was too much.

I felt my eyes rolling up in their sockets and was aware that I was falling backward. That was all I knew before I passed out.

When I came to and opened my eyes, Captain Williams had taken off his captain’s cap and was fanning my face with it. I was lying on something soft, and I had to squint against the breeze Williams was stirring up and tilt my head to see that I was lying in Logan Rafferty’s lap.

I let out a yelp and started trying to struggle into a sitting position. “Get off me!” I said to Rafferty.

“You’re mixed up, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “I believe you’re the one on me.”

“Yeah, but I was unconscious! That’s the only way I’d ever be anywhere near your lap, you…you…”

While I was sputtering in indignation, Captain Williams said, “Are you all right, Ms. Dickinson?”

“I just fainted, that’s all.” Too much champagne and not enough food, I thought. That, and the sight of a corpse crammed into a storage locker.

“You didn’t hit your head when you fell, or anything like that?”

I had managed to sit up. I tugged my dress down with one hand and patted my head with the other, feeling for any goose eggs. I didn’t find any.

“I’m fine,” I said. “At least I will be if one of you gentlemen will help me up.”

Two of the three other men standing in the corridor wore white trousers and dark blue shirts. That was the uniform the stewards and other crew members wore. The third man was in khaki work clothes. The grease stains on his hands told me he probably tended the engines.

Rafferty had stood up. He took my hand and lifted me to my feet. Instinctively, I brushed myself off, even though the corridor floor seemed pretty clean.

“I apologize,” Williams said. “I admit that I intended to shock you by showing you Webster’s body, Ms. Dickinson. I thought that if you knew anything about his death, you might blurt it out.”

I glanced at Rafferty. “Sounds like something you would do.”

He held up his hands and shook his head. “The captain’s running this show. He’s the final authority on this boat.”

“Well, within reason,” Williams said. “I’m afraid that in circumstances such as these, I’ll have to defer to the law. Call the Hannibal police, Mr. Rafferty.”

Rafferty hesitated. “We don’t know when or where Webster was killed. If it was while we were still on the river, before we docked, the State Police will have jurisdiction.”

That answered my question about who was responsible for law enforcement on the Mississippi, I thought.

“We’ll start by notifying the authorities in Hannibal,” Williams decided. “If they want to, they can call in the State Police.”

Rafferty shrugged, took out his cell phone, and walked off down the corridor to make the call.

The captain’s plan sounded logical to me. Let the cops sort it all out and decide what to do next. Whoever was in charge of the investigation, I intended to cooperate fully with them.

Which meant I’d have to tell them that Ben Webster had had a run-in earlier in the day with Logan Rafferty. I glanced at Rafferty from the corner of my eye.

He was big enough to break somebody’s neck, that was for sure. He was considerably taller and heavier than Webster, and in his job as head of security for the riverboat, he’d probably had some training in handling passengers who had lost their temper and gotten violent, as well as practical experience. I didn’t doubt for a second that he was capable of killing Ben Webster, at least physically.

I wasn’t sure why he would have done such a thing, though. He had seemed satisfied with telling Webster he had to get off the boat when it docked in Hannibal.

But what if Webster had tried to cause more trouble after fooling me with that cabin trick? If Rafferty had caught him in the middle of committing some sort of sabotage, and the two of them had struggled…

It seemed reasonable to me. The problem was that if such a thing had happened, Rafferty could have just told the truth about it. It was his job to protect the Southern Belle, after all. He wouldn’t have needed to hide Webster’s body and try to cover up what had happened. There would have been an investigation, of course, and the incident might have hurt the riverboat’s reputation and gotten Rafferty in trouble with the owner, Charles Gallister, but I was convinced that he wouldn’t have been charged with anything if things had happened according to the scenario I laid out in my head.

Somebody else would have to sort that out. There was also the operator of the roulette wheel to consider. Webster had accused him of cheating and taken a swing at him. However, I thought it was pretty unlikely the fella would have tracked Webster down later and killed him over that.

As those thoughts were going through my head, Captain Williams turned to me and asked, “When was the last time you saw Mr. Webster?”

“Earlier this afternoon.” I hesitated.

“Mr. Rafferty has told me about the incident in the casino involving Mr. Webster,” Williams said. “You don’t have to worry about revealing anything you shouldn’t.”

“Well, in that case, it was right after that when I saw Webster last. I went with him back to his cabin and told him to get his things together so he could leave the boat when it docked here in Hannibal.”

I didn’t say anything about the cabin switcheroo Webster had pulled. For one thing, it made me look sort of dumb, and for another, despite being the captain of the riverboat, Williams wasn’t a police officer. I didn’t have to answer his questions.

The trick about the cabins indicated to me that Webster had been up to something, so I knew I’d have to tell the cops about it. Until that time came, I intended to keep that bit of information to myself.

“Did he have any trouble with any of the other members of your tour group?”

That was the sort of question the cops would ask, too. But I could answer it honestly by shaking my head and saying, “Not that I know of.” I asked a question of my own. “Who found Webster’s body?”

Williams nodded toward the man in khakis and grease stains. “Henry here. He’s one of our engineers.”

I looked at the man and asked, “Is this some sort of storage closet?”

“That’s right, ma’am,” he answered. “We keep mostly tools in it. I opened the door to get a wrench I needed to adjust one of the valves on the boilers.”

I forced myself to look into the closet again and saw that Webster’s body had been shoved up against shelves that contained wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, plastic boxes full of assorted nuts and bolts and washers, and a lot of other stuff that I didn’t know what it was.

“Do you have to get things out of here pretty often?” I asked.

Henry shrugged and shook his head. “Not really. We keep the engines and boilers in top-notch shape, so they don’t need much work except for routine maintenance, and all that’s done while the boat’s docked in St. Louis. It’s not unusual for us to make several cruises without anybody ever having to open this door.”

If someone knew that, they would also know that the supply closet wasn’t a bad place to stash a body. There was at least a chance no one would discover it until the Southern Belle returned to St. Louis. To me, that seemed to indicate that the killer was somebody pretty familiar with the operation of the riverboat.

Like Logan Rafferty, I thought as the man himself came back along the corridor.

“The cops will be here in a few minutes,” he announced.

Captain Williams frowned at me. “I didn’t care for the tone of those questions you were asking, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “You seem to think that a member of my crew could be responsible for what happened to Mr. Webster.”

“Well, you’ve got to admit it’s a possibility,” I said. “Shoot, right now everybody on the boat’s a suspect, isn’t that right?”

“There are close to a hundred passengers on board,” Williams said, his voice cool. “Webster was a passenger. I’d say that’s where you’ll find the killer.”

“I don’t plan on findin’ the killer,” I said. “That’s a job for the police.”

And I sure hoped that it worked out that way this time.