“Aren’t you cold?” I asked him when we were almost to the top.
He laughed and raised his arms to the sky. “Cold? Not at all. I must be warm-blooded.”
Kathy laughed along with him. “You wouldn’t say that in the winter back where we live, in Cabot Cove, Maine,” she said.
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “I just may visit you there and prove you wrong.”
We stuttered to a stop at the top of the tram, and everyone exited the car.
“What a view,” Bill said.
He was right. The vista from that vantage point was spectacular. But I was focusing on the hodgepodge of tiny houses that seemed to have been built haphazardly, many of them clinging to the side of the mountain. They were painted in a variety of colors, blues and greens, reds and yellows, and even an occasional purple or orange one. There weren’t any streets as we know them in the East, which I knew would make it difficult to find the house in which Maurice Quarlé lived.
“Where do we begin?” Kathy asked.
Bill pointed to a cluster of houses a few hundred feet away. “We might as well start there,” he said.
We reached the area he’d indicated and slowly went from house to house, looking for a sign that said SERENITY HOUSE. We got lucky. It was the second one we passed. A small front porch contained a variety of old, broken-down furniture, a mattress, the frame of a bicycle minus its wheels, and assorted other discarded items. I saw no sign of life and wondered whether we had made the trip for nothing. But I wasn’t about to leave without ascertaining that for sure. I started up a rickety set of stairs, but Bill stopped me.
“I’ll go,” he said.
Kathy and I watched as he went up onto the porch and knocked. There was no reply. He looked back at us, shrugged, and knocked again, louder this time. He tried the door. It opened with a groan.
Kathy and I joined him on the porch and peered through the open door. Aside from minimal light coming through a window at the rear of the house, it was dark inside. Silhouetted against the window was what appeared to be large pieces of furniture.
Bill stepped inside, and we followed him tentatively. There was a musty smell that overrode other indefinable odors.
A narrow staircase was to our left. It occurred to me that the house didn’t seem large enough to contain apartments for rent. Not only that, the chaos on the first floor made me wonder whether Maurice Quarlé—or anyone else, for that matter—actually lived there.
“Stay here,” Bill said as he started up the stairs.
“I’m coming with you,” said Kathy.
I fell in behind them.
When Bill reached a tiny landing at the top, he motioned with his hand for us to wait. We did as he asked, and he proceeded down a confined hallway covered with threadbare carpeting to a door at the far end. Now I could see that there was the possibility of apartments, although they would have to be very small ones. I counted four doors off the hall.
There was another hand signal from Bill for us not to come any farther. Kathy and I stayed where we were as Bill opened the door. If someone did live there, he or she was a trusting soul. Neither the front door nor the door Bill had just opened needed a key.
Bill disappeared through the open door. I started to join him, but he suddenly stepped back into the hall and said, “I don’t think you’ll want to see this, Mrs. Fletcher.”
His statement only made me want to see what I’d been told not to see. I went to where Bill stood, just outside the room, and looked past him. A man, a very dead man, was sprawled in a large yellow upholstered wing chair. His arms were flung over the sides, and his legs were akimbo in front of him. His head had fallen to one side; his mouth was wide open, as were his eyes. He wore a pale blue T-shirt, through which a large amount of blood had seeped from his chest. The cause of the bleeding was evident. The handle of a knife protruded from his heart, once beating and circulating blood throughout his body.
Kathy now joined us. She uttered an anguished cry and shoved her fist to her mouth to muffle it. I entered the room and approached the body.
“Don’t!” Kathy cried.
I ignored her and placed two fingertips against the side of the dead man’s throat. It was an academic exercise. That he was dead was beyond debate. But I did it anyway, from force of habit.
I looked around the cramped room. There was a single bed in one corner and an armoire in another. There was no closet. A small desk beneath a window was encrusted with years of dirt. I went to the desk and looked down at items strewn about on it, including a wallet. I opened it. Peering back at me from beneath a plastic sleeve was an Alaska driver’s license. The picture on it was of the dead man in the chair. The name on the license was MAURICE QUARLÉ.
Chapter Nine
The natural instinct was to call 911, but since I had
Trooper McQuesten’s direct line, I dialed that on my cell phone instead. He answered on the first ring. I told him what we had discovered, and he said he would dispatch a team there immediately. He and two uniformed troopers arrived in less than ten minutes.
McQuesten greeted us on the porch, where we had congregated while waiting for his arrival. I judged him to be in his mid to late thirties. He was a big man, well over six feet tall. He wore a gray and black tweed jacket, wrinkled gray pants, and muddy ankle-high boots. His white shirt appeared to be too tight for his sizable neck; its collar points turned up. The tie he wore was maroon, in an old-fashioned knit style.
“Where’s the body?” he asked.
“Upstairs,” I replied. “The room at the end of the hall.”
He dispatched his officers into the house, but he stayed on the porch to speak with us.
“What brought you here?” he asked.
I explained why Kathy and I had a particular interest in Maurice Quarlé.
“So you think he had something to do with your sister’s disappearance?” he said to Kathy.
“I’m the one who came to that conclusion,” I said.
“Do you have any tangible evidence of that, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“No, just a series of coincidences. He seemed to have spent a great deal of time with Wilimena Copeland on her cruise. Besides, another passenger who knew him didn’t speak very highly of his character.”
McQuesten smiled. “Whoever that is,” he said, “is a pretty good judge of people. Mr. Quarlé was not what you’d call one of Juneau’s most sterling citizens.”
“I take it he’s no stranger to you,” I said.
“Hardly. Maurice has been in and out of trouble here in Juneau ever since he arrived four or five years ago. Nothing violent, just a succession of scams, conning people out of money, bad checks, a couple of phony credit cards, things like that. But despite that record, he had a legitimate side to him when it came to steamship companies. He wangled jobs aboard some ships teaching French to passengers, and he made some money booking tour groups—got a commission, I suppose. He was a pleasant enough little guy, talked a good game. But that’s not surprising. You can’t be an effective con man unless you have the gift of gab.”
“I would imagine someone like that makes quite a few enemies,” I said.
“Sure. By the way, you haven’t introduced me to your friends.”
“This is Wilimena Copeland’s sister, Kathy Copeland, and this is our friend Bill Henderson.”
As McQuesten shook hands with them, one of his officers emerged from the house and asked whether McQuesten was coming up to the murder scene. He said he was, excused himself from us, and followed the uniformed trooper back inside.
“This is just beginning to set in on me,” Bill Henderson said. “I never figured when I booked this cruise that I’d be coming across dead bodies.”
“It’s my fault,” Kathy said. “If I hadn’t asked you to accompany us here, you wouldn’t have been subjected to this.”
“Don’t give it a second thought,” he said, giving her a playful hug. “I lead a pretty dull life. I can use some excitement.”
“Who could have done such a terrible thing?” Kathy asked no one in particular. “How can anyone take another person’s life like that?”
“The world is full of bad people,” Bill said. “Look what the cop had to say about the deceased. Can you imagine all the people he’d swindled who’d be glad to see him dead?”
“If that’s the reason he was killed,” I offered.
Kathy and Bill looked at me.
“I still can’t help but believe that Mr. Quarlé had something to do with Wilimena’s disappearance,” I said.
“Are you saying that he might have been killed because of a connection with Willie?” Kathy asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, “but it is a possibility.”
I slipped into my what-if mode of thinking.
What if Quarlé had learned from Willie about the gold and had decided to befriend her in the hope of getting his hands on it? And what if he’d shared that aspiration with someone else? It wouldn’t have been very smart of him to do that, but it wasn’t smart of Willie to blab about it, either. According to what McQuesten had said about Quarlé, he was the sort of person who wouldn’t be comfortable keeping things to himself. What if he had brought someone else into his confidence in the hope of getting money up front by promising a piece of the action? Had he gotten the money and reneged? Was that why he was killed?
Of course, this was all pure speculation on my part, my sometimes overworked imagination shifting into high gear. That’s usually the way I come up with plots for my novels, playing the what-if game with myself. But I’ve also had good results applying it to real-life crime, and I saw no reason to put the brakes on where the murder of Maurice Quarlé was concerned.
It became evident to Kathy and Bill that I had drifted into a reverie of sorts, because they asked in unison, “Are you all right?”
“What? Oh, my mind was elsewhere. Don’t mind me. It happens from time to time.”
Trooper McQuesten came from the house, followed by another trooper. “We have a coroner on his way, and a crime scene technician,” he said. “I’m leaving one of my men here until they arrive. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you folks would come back to my office so I can take a formal statement about what happened here.”
“Do we have to?” Kathy asked.
“This has been quite a shock for her, Officer,” Bill said.
“Yes, I imagine it has been,” the trooper said. “Tell you what. I’ll have Trooper Jenkins take a statement from you here at the house. But I would like Mrs. Fletcher to come with me. I want to take her statement in a more formal setting, and I also want to discuss with her the death that occurred on the ship in Glacier Bay.” He turned to me. “Is that all right with you, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, surprised at how easily he’d agreed to excuse Kathy and Bill.
“Will you be okay?” I asked Kathy.
“Sure,” she said.
“Don’t worry about her, Mrs. Fletcher,” Bill said, pulling her close to him. “I’ll make sure nothing happens to my favorite lady.”
Kathy said she wasn’t up for another trip on the tram, so Trooper McQuesten drove the three of us back down to the dock and dropped Kathy and Bill off there. We agreed to meet in the Crow’s Nest, where Kathy was scheduled to be interviewed by David Johansen.
“Well,” McQuesten said once we were settled in his small office in a building used by both the Juneau police and the Alaska State Troopers, “I didn’t expect to end up meeting you at the scene of a murder.”
“I’m as surprised as you are,” I said. “Frankly, I prefer the fictitious murders in my books to real ones.”
“I can’t say that I blame you,” he said. “I’ll be candid, Mrs. Fletcher. I preferred that you come back here with me without your friends.”
“Why is that?”
He pulled a photograph from a drawer and slid it across the desk.
If he meant to shock me, he succeeded. The color photograph was of a smiling Kathy Copeland.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“From a dead man’s room.”
“Mr. Quarlé?”
“No, from the cabin of the man who went over the side of the Glacial Queen yesterday.”
I tried to formulate a question, but he saved me the trouble. “I have no idea why he had this photograph, Mrs. Fletcher, nor did I know the identity of the person in the picture until I saw your friend—Ms. Copeland.”
“But why would that man have Kathy’s picture?” I asked, despite knowing that he didn’t have an answer.
“Maybe you have an idea about that, Mrs. Fletcher.”
“I can certainly speculate,” I said. “The fact that he had her photo confirms for me that he was, in some way, interested in her sister’s disappearance. The question I have is why he seemed to be following me and not her.”
“Maybe this will answer that,” he said, retrieving something else from the drawer. It was the hardcover version of one of my earlier books; my photograph took up the entire back cover. A sticker indicated that it had come from the Glacial Queen’s library.
“Somehow,” I said, “he didn’t strike me as a man who enjoyed reading.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t. He wanted that picture of you, not the words you wrote.”
“I should be disappointed.”
“I sense that you aren’t.”
“You sense right. What else did you find in his cabin?”
A third item emerged from the desk drawer, a passport. I opened it and stared at the photo of the man. The name on it was John Smith.
“The passport is a phony, just like his name,” McQuesten said.
“John Smith,” I said absently. “Any idea what his real name is?”
McQuesten shook his head. “We’re working on it. He evidently was from New York.”
“So I understand. Would I be wrong in assuming that there’s more in that desk drawer that might interest me?”
He smiled and rubbed his eyes. “I’m afraid that’s all that’s in my goody bag for the moment,” he said.
“I’d say that’s quite enough for one day. I think I’ll head back to the ship. This has all been very fatiguing.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. You will let me know if anything comes out of the Maurice Quarlé investigation that has bearing on Wilimena Copeland’s disappearance?”
“Of course. By the way, I spoke with Detective Flowers this morning. He’s in Ketchikan following up on possible leads.”
My expression asked the obvious question.
“Nothing tangible so far,” McQuesten said. “It’s really strange that she’s disappeared so completely without leaving a trace. It makes me think perhaps she doesn’t want to be found.”
Murder, She Wrote: Panning For Murder: Panning For Murder (Murder She Wrote) Page 14