Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “It can be done,” the crisp-voiced young woman told me. “But of course, there’s an additional charge.”

  “That’s understandable,” I agreed. “So how does one go about it?”

  “Both people have to come to the purser’s desk together. That way, new key cards can be issued to both of them at once.”

  “I see,” I said.

  The job would have to be done in person. We’d have to go and stand in line in public to do it, and I was sure the fresh-faced young people at the purser’s desk would all jump to the same conclusions Hector had. It wasn’t something I looked forward to with eager anticipation.

  The bathroom door opened. Naomi emerged wearing the robe and with a towel wrapped turban-style around her head. Free of smudged makeup, she looked refreshed and even a little relaxed. I handed her the Room Service menu. “Order something for both of us,” I said.

  “But it’s early,” she objected. “Don’t you want to wait?”

  “There’s nothing magic about eating dinner at eight-thirty. Besides, I ended up skipping lunch today, too. We’ll eat now. Then we’ll go down to the purser’s desk and make arrangements to trade in your old key card for one to this room.”

  Naomi was talking on the phone to Room Service when there was a tap on the door. Hector, still grinning, stood in the hallway carrying two suitcases. “Come in,” I said. “Just put them on the bed.”

  He did so, but I caught him taking a discreet look at Naomi in the process. He was surprised, I think, to discover that the woman in my room wasn’t the same one he had seen me with most recently. Once again I made as if to tip him. Once again he declined.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I hope you and madame have a very pleasant trip.” With a courtly bow, he let himself out and closed the door.

  Naomi finished up with Room Service. “Thank you for getting my things. It’s so nice to finally get out of those grubby clothes.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “But why don’t you go ahead and unpack? That way, when our dinner comes, there will be room enough to maneuver the dinner cart.”

  “Where should I put things?”

  “Help yourself. Use whatever you need—the closet, the inside bedside table.”

  I didn’t add that I hoped she’d also get dressed. It was bad enough to have half the ship’s crew snickering at us. My worst fear, though, was that Lars or Beverly would show up at the door unannounced.

  Naomi Pepper and I may not have had any overtly dishonorable designs on one another, but that didn’t mean our reputations wouldn’t suffer—especially if my grandparents got wind of what was going on. I had come along to chaperon them, but the way things were going, they might well feel obliged to chaperon me.

  16

  THE GRILLED HALIBUT STEAKS Naomi Pepper and I had for dinner that evening were among the best I’ve ever eaten, and that includes meals prepared at some of the tonier seafood restaurants in downtown Seattle. There may have been a few things about cruising that didn’t measure up to expectations, but the food on board the Starfire Breeze was more than living up to advance rave notices.

  When we finished eating, Naomi pushed away from the table and smiled. “I really do feel better,” she said. “I must have been running on empty.”

  “My mother always said, ‘Food for the body is food for the soul.’ Not terrifically profound, but true anyway.”

  “Is your mother still alive?” Naomi asked.

  “No. She died of cancer years ago.”

  “And the grandmother who’s on the ship? Is she your mother’s mother or your father’s?”

  “I never met my father,” I told her. “He died before I was born. Beverly is my mother’s mother, and she’s outlived her daughter by decades.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Naomi said. “It’s supposed to be the other way around. Parents are supposed to die first.”

  “Life isn’t fair,” I told her.

  Naomi glanced at her watch. It was only a little past seven. “Since we’ve already eaten dinner, what do we do with the rest of the evening?”

  “First we go down to the purser’s desk and straighten out the key-card situation.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not? If we go now, we may be done before the first-seating dinner crowd gets out of the dining rooms and before the second seating shows up.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, the fewer people we run into, the better.”

  As we stepped into the corridor, Hector’s cart was parked two rooms away from where it had been before. Leaving Naomi standing in the hallway, I poked my head into the room where he was working. “Ready for your dinner service to be removed?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “That would be fine. And another thing. Does the king-sized bed in my suite break apart into two singles?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you do our turndown service, would you mind doing that—turning them into two separate beds? I’d really appreciate it.”

  A look of complete consternation crossed Hector’s face. Madame and me in twin beds wasn’t how he had read the situation. A guy with women running in and out of his room wasn’t supposed to ask for separate beds when it came time for sleeping arrangements. I could see from his frown that he was disappointed in me—that he was taking what he saw as my lack of sexual prowess personally. His words, however, belied the frown.

  “Of course, Mr. Beaumont. Right away.”

  The people at the purser’s desk disapproved of the new roommate arrangement as well, but we muddled through. When we finished, I asked Naomi what she wanted to do next. The first-seating crowd was now beginning to trickle out of dining rooms and back into the atrium and lobby areas. Since we wanted to avoid people as much as possible, we opted for the cardroom, where the two of us played a hard-fought game of Scrabble. I’ve been an inveterate worker of crossword puzzles all my life. As a consequence, Scrabble is one board game—the only board game—I’m fairly good at. Unfortunately, Naomi was better than I was, although not by much. I was leading right up to the last word, then she moved ahead by ten points.

  After leaving the cardroom, we took a turn around the Promenade Deck before the chilly breeze and misty rain drove us back inside. After that, we returned to the room—our room—where Hector had done my bidding. Where before there had been a single king-sized bed, there were now two twins, both neatly turned down and with a mint resting on each freshly fluffed pillow.

  I’ve never been much of a believer in twin beds. I felt as though we’d fallen through a time warp and landed in the middle of a 1950s-era situation comedy. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had been married for years before she turned up pregnant, but I don’t ever remember seeing them in anything other than twin beds. The same goes for Ozzie and Harriet. I always wondered if they alternated beds for sex or just did it on the floor.

  “Are you responsible for that?” Naomi demanded as soon as she saw the newly revised sleeping arrangement. From her tone of voice, it was impossible for me to tell if she was mad about it or pleased.

  “Hector’s the one who actually did it,” I told her. “But I’m the one who asked him to. I hope you don’t mind. Roll-away beds hurt my ribs. After last night, I figured we both needed some decent rest.”

  To my amazement, Naomi promptly burst into tears again. They leaked out of her eyes and dribbled in muddy streaks down her cheeks. “Thanks,” she murmured. “I’ve been worried about it all evening, but after you were nice enough to let me stay here, I didn’t want to mention it. I mean, after what happened between Harrison and me, I was afraid you’d just laugh if I told you I wasn’t that kind of girl.”

  “Who’s worried about you?” I asked with a grin. “I’m not that kind of boy.”

  Leaving her to mull that, I turned to the telephone, where the message light was blinking furiously. There was only one message on voice mail—a call from Carol Ehlers.

  “I’m staying over in Skagway with friends toni
ght,” she said. “Give me a call on my cell phone when you can. Here’s the number.”

  In attempting to return the call I endured several impatient minutes as I sorted my way through the ship-to-shore hassle. I could see that leaving my own trusty cell phone at home in Seattle had been a mistake. Florence Wakefield had told me that her cell phone had been working perfectly ever since the Starfire Breeze had entered Alaskan waters. When Ralph Ames had first urged me to buy a cell phone, I had argued with him about it and then griped incessantly once I finally knuckled under and bought one. Now here I was, a few years later, complaining because I didn’t have one in my hand. There’s no pleasing some people.

  At last Carol Ehlers answered her phone. “Beau,” she said pleasantly when she heard who it was. “Thanks for returning my call. I thought you’d want to be brought up-to-date. Lucy Conyers has retained me, and she insists that she’ll pay all my initial consultation costs as well. That means you’re free and clear on that score, and everything here is under control.”

  “That’s good,” I breathed. “How’s Lucy holding up?”

  “All right, all things considered,” Carol told me, “but they did book her.”

  “On what little that twerp Liebowitz had going?” I asked.

  Carol sighed. “I’m afraid so.”

  “She didn’t confess, did she?”

  “No, Lucy didn’t do that. She told me she’s watched Law and Order enough that she knew she needed to keep her mouth shut.”

  “There you are, then,” I said. “I guess television is good for something after all.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Carol said with another infectious laugh. “We’ll be doing an attorney-present interview with Liebowitz and Ripley bright and early tomorrow morning. That’s why I’m staying over tonight. I was waiting at the station when they finally came driving into town. And I was right about Sonny taking his own sweet time to get her here. I’m sure he was working on her the whole way. It’s a miracle she didn’t cave.”

  In my homicide days I had cleared more than a few cases by way of patrol-car-induced confessions, so I knew the drill. This time I was glad the ruse of chatting up the suspect hadn’t worked. Lucy Conyers had been under terrible emotional stress. I was sure she felt responsible for the fact that Mike had been in harm’s way in the first place. It wouldn’t be too difficult for an underhanded cop to take advantage of that sense of responsibility and make whatever she said sound like an out-and-out confession.

  “I know it meant a lot to Lucy to have me there,” Carol Ehlers continued. “She said for me to say thank you.”

  “She’s welcome,” I said.

  “Where’s the Starfire Breeze going after Glacier Bay?” Carol Ehlers asked.

  I fumbled around until I located my previously unread copy of the Starfire Courier. “Sitka is the day after tomorrow. The next day we head back to Seattle.”

  “So you’re not in port at all tomorrow. All right. I’ll have my investigator, Jack Hedges, meet up with you in Sitka. I’ll want him to interview everyone who was in the train car with Mike and Lucy Conyers.”

  Great, I thought. Once Carol Ehlers’ detective joined the parade, there would be almost as many investigators on board the Starfire Breeze as there were ordinary passengers.

  “Talking to the people in the car isn’t going to cut it,” I told her. “The person who did this came from one of the other cars. I tried explaining all that to Sonny Liebowitz, and now I’m telling you the same thing. The intended target was a guy by the name of Marc Alley.”

  “How do you know this?”

  Although my face was turned away from her, I could feel Naomi Pepper’s eyes drilling into the back of my head. “I can’t say right now,” I said. “It’s confidential.”

  Carol didn’t miss a beat. “I get it,” she said. “Someone must be there with you. I’ll make sure Jack speaks to you about this in private.”

  “You might suggest that he contact a pair of passengers named Kurt and Phyllis Nix.”

  “Were they on the train?”

  “No, but they know something about it. Tell Phyllis I gave you her name. That should help.”

  “Good.”

  Carol had definitely picked up on my tone of voice. “Don’t worry about Lucy Conyers,” she assured me. “I’m very good at what I do—just ask Sonny Liebowitz. He wasn’t thrilled to see me turn up in her corner, I can tell you that. But speaking of what I do, Ralph mentioned there was some other problem on board the Starfire Breeze—that some other passenger might also be in need of my services. Do you know about that?”

  More than I should and not nearly enough, I thought, but with Naomi Pepper sitting right there on the sofa, my answer had to be circumspect. “For the moment that all seems to be under control.”

  “Good. Let me know if anything changes.”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  I hung up. When I turned back to Naomi, she was staring at me with a puzzled frown. “Marc Alley?” she asked. “The guy from dinner?”

  “Right.”

  “Why would someone want to kill him?”

  “I can’t say,” I said. “It’s part of an ongoing investigation. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

  “So you’re still a detective after all. You aren’t retired at all.”

  “I am retired,” I told her. “I got roped into all this by accident.”

  “You say Marc was the real target, but they arrested the man’s widow?” Naomi asked. I nodded. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows? One of Ralph Ames’ friends, a defense lawyer named Carol Ehlers, has ridden to the rescue for the time being. No matter what, they won’t charge Lucy Conyers with first-degree murder. To do that, they’d have to prove premeditation. There’s no way Lucy could have known that as soon as the train entered the tunnel, the whole place would go black.”

  “Why not?” Naomi said. “It’s on the video.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked. “What video?”

  “The video of the train trip,” Naomi replied.

  “Are you kidding? You’ve seen one of those?”

  “Sure,” she said. “They probably have it for times when the weather’s too bad for people to see anything. There’s one of Glacier Bay, too. I watched the Skagway one today, since I wasn’t able to get off the ship myself. It shows the museum with all the gear the people had to carry with them. Then it follows most, if not all, of the train trip. It shows the cars going completely dark when the train heads into Tunnel Mountain. It even talks about how long it takes for the train to make it all the way through. I think it’s something like six and a half minutes.”

  I was stunned. If Lucy Conyers had watched the video, she would have known about the tunnel. Any other passenger on board the Starfire Breeze would have known the same thing. There went my pet theory about no possible premeditation. Whoever had killed Mike Conyers had known exactly how much time would elapse between the time the train went dark and the time people could see again.

  “Am I going to need one of those?” Naomi’s voice brought me back to the present.

  “One of what?”

  “A defense attorney.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “How expensive is your friend, the one I talked to today?”

  “Ralph’s expensive, but he’s also one of the best.”

  “What if I can’t afford him?” she asked despairingly.

  “How about if we cross that bridge when we get to it?” I suggested.

  After that, neither Naomi nor I seemed to have much more to say. There were several movies to choose from on the television set, so we settled on one of those and watched it. By the time the movie was over, Naomi was curled up on her bed, buried under a mound of covers, and sound asleep. Unfortunately, I was wide awake.

  Back in my homicide days, I used to lie awake at times as well. When I couldn’t sleep, instead of tossing and turning, I’d use that middle-of-the-night time and mentally sort
through various aspects of whatever case I was working on. Sometimes, in the dark of night, pieces of a case that had blown in all directions during the day would suddenly slip into place. So I did that now. I closed my eyes and tried to focus all my thoughts on what had happened on the train ride—on exactly what had been said and who had been where at any given moment.

  I tried to remember how it was that Lars had ended up taking Mike Conyers outside instead of Lucy’s doing it. How had she reacted? I couldn’t recall that she’d appeared to be anything other than grateful when Lars took the responsibility off her hands. And when exactly had she left her seat to go to the rest room? Was it before Marc Alley had come through our car or after? Maybe someone else would know—Beverly, perhaps, or maybe Florence or Claire Wakefield. I took a notepad and pen off the table and jotted a blindly written reminder to ask them each that question the next time I saw them.

  And what about Marc? I remember seeing him standing poised with his camera in hand just as the train car entered the tunnel. I recalled one flash for sure, but then, as I lay there, I wondered if maybe there hadn’t been two, a second one slightly after the first. On a fresh piece of notepad I scribbled another reminder, telling me to check with Marc Alley to find out whether or not he’d gone to the photo center to have his pictures developed.

  The whole exercise took me back to a story I remember reading in a high school literature book. It was about a man who had spent his whole adult life delivering milk with a horse and wagon. One day, the man dropped over dead without ever getting into the wagon, but the horse still ran the whole route, stopping and waiting in front of each house just the way he would have if the man had been getting in and out to deliver milk.

  Here I was doing the same thing. I wasn’t a homicide cop anymore. Rachel Dulles had “fired” me from my stint as unpaid FBI informant. I had no business asking questions, worrying about suspects, or questioning alibis. And yet I couldn’t help myself. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t stop doing it. It’s one of those lessons late in the learning, but being a detective doesn’t come with an off/on toggle switch. The city fathers can give you your gold watch and show you the door, but just because they put you out to pasture doesn’t mean you can quit. Once a detective, always a detective, plain and simple.