Death on the Mississippi

by Forrest, Richard;

  Looking out the window, Lyon saw a tow truck lifting the front end of the Pranko Construction Company station wagon. “Someone seems to be interfering with your automobile,” he said.

  Dice took a disinterested glance. “They’re repossessing it, like everything else around here.”

  “What are your plans?” Lyon asked.

  “I don’t have any choice, Mr. Wentworth. Dalton’s actions have sentenced me to an indeterminate sentence tied to this project until some court, months or years from now, lets me go.”

  “I’d like to talk to Bobby Douglas,” Lyon said.

  Dice’s short burst of laughter was like the double snap of a clapboard. “That rat was the first to leave this sinking sandpile. He was gone the morning after Dalton’s disappearing act. There’s no one left out here except Kat Loops, who we let occupy one of the cottages.”

  “She’s still waiting for her boyfriend who ain’t never coming back,” Sam said from the doorway.

  Dice’s face brightened for the first time. “You found out something?”

  “Damn right! I just got off the phone with the Blue Bay Marina in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. They didn’t know from nothing about the Mississippi, but thought it funny that a guy was there for two days asking the same questions. They said he was good looking and seemed to know boats. He had a great suntan and walked with a limp. Guess who?”

  “What in hell is Bobby doing in Delaware?” Dice said.

  “Because,” Sam continued, “from the way he talked to the marina people he expected the Mississippi to be there. The tennis-playing bastard intended to meet Dalton in Delaware.”

  “Get the police on the phone,” Dice snapped.

  “You got it!” Sam snatched the telephone from its cradle and began to dial.

  Lyon turned to leave. “By the way,” he said to Dice. “When you boarded the Mississippi the other day you were quite angry until Dalton talked to you. What did he say?”

  “Captain Norbert, please,” Sam said over the phone as he looked at Dice with interest.

  Lyon had often heard the phrase “all the color draining,” but had never before actually witnessed anyone turn instantly pale. Dice’s eyes widened, and he gulped air as if hyperventilating.

  “What in the hell did he say to you?” Sam demanded.

  “Nothing,” Dice finally articulated.

  Sam’s eyes locked with Lyon’s. “That sounds like a hell of a powerful nothing, if you ask me.”

  “It’s not important,” Dice said as he stumbled around his desk and dashed for the hall and a small bathroom next door.

  “I think someone has something on someone.” Sam said. “Hello, Captain Norbert. We got a line on the bastard.”

  He found Katrina Loops sunbathing on the narrow beach just beyond the seawall. She lay facedown on a large beach towel with a small towel over her round bottom. She seemed to stretch from the high-water mark to the seawall. A paperback novel lay near her right hand, a small Thermos jug by the left. He noticed that there wasn’t any bra strap crossing her bare back, and that gave him a strong suspicion that there was little if anything but Katrina under the small towel that covered her rear.

  She had obviously fallen asleep in the warm sun, and this presented a problem of decorum. How do you politely awaken a nearly naked lady without causing her movements to throw off the single modest covering she wore? He decided that no matter how he approached the problem, there was going to be a moment or two when his lascivious thoughts were apparent. He bent down and gently shook her arm.

  “Katrina. It’s Lyon Wentworth.”

  She didn’t respond, but his modest shaking movement caused the towel to slowly slide onto the sand. She lay nude before him and he hastily stood and turned away. The waters of the Sound were a grayish blue with Long Island’s low profile in the distance. Something was wrong.

  Something was drastically wrong.

  He turned and knelt. He felt her wrist and then his fingers searched for the carotid artery. He grasped her shoulder and slowly turned her over. Her eyes were wide open and the pupils were fixed as her head lolled loosely to the side. Katrina Loops was quite dead.

  Lyon recoiled from the obscenity of death. He had seen its face many times, in different places and guises, but each time it seemed uniquely and horribly fresh. A living personality had been obliterated and reduced to a mass of dying cells.

  A thin ribbon of blood had oozed from a narrow slit between her breasts. It seemed apparent that she had been stabbed with a thin-bladed knife that had pierced the sternum and entered the myocardium to cause instant death.

  He turned away and walked slowly back to the office, where he found Sam and Randy in whispered consultation. They looked up with annoyance at his intrusion.

  “I think you had better get Captain Norbert back on the phone,” Lyon said.

  The Pincus Resort was located in the small town of Eastbrook, which did not have its own full-time police force. Police services were provided by a part-time constabulary and a resident state trooper with backup from the local barracks. This meant that Captain Norbert and his men descended on the scene in large numbers.

  Lyon sat on the seawall fifty yards down from the body. Pan Turman sat by his side and shivered in the warm sun. Police cruisers, official vans, and an ambulance speckled the lawns. A bevy of officers and technicians surrounded the body and spoke in hushed tones.

  “She must have family somewhere,” Pan said. “Later, I’ll see if I can find her personnel file and see who it lists so I can phone them. She was such a beautiful woman. Large, but put together well with a marvelous figure. She was a great salesperson and sold more units than anyone else, but there is one little small, tiny thing about it all.”

  Lyon looked at her. “What’s that?”

  Pan pulled his head down to her lips with both hands and whispered in a deep voice. “The wicked witch is dead. The bitchy witch is dead, and am I glad.”

  Lyon recoiled from her and looked into her sparkling eyes. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I knew about them from the start, you know. Oh, they thought they were so smart about it, and she even took up with Bobby to throw me off the track, but I knew. I knew from the first time they did it together, and now she’ll never screw anybody ever again.”

  He inched along the seawall away from her, but she grasped both his hands in hers and held him. He wondered if the specks in her eyes were madness or reflected ocean light, or was her naiveté such that she didn’t properly assess what she was really saying? Was this slight woman strong enough to attack and pierce the breastbone of a far larger woman with one thrust of the knife? “You don’t mean what you’re saying, Pan,” he finally said.

  Her head tilted as she smiled with a childlike radiance. “Oh, silly, of course I didn’t kill her. I just meant that it doesn’t break me up. I will send lots of nice flowers to her family. Will we have to stay around here much longer?”

  “They’re going to want statements from both of us,” Lyon answered.

  “Well, there’s nothing I can tell them, except that I’ve been staying at your house, and when I came out here this morning I think Katrina purposely avoided me.”

  “You know, Pan, they’ll speak to you today and then check and cross-check until they’re satisfied that you’ve told them everything.”

  She hugged her shoulders as if a dank breeze had blown in from the sea. “They’ll have lots of questions.” It was a statement.

  “A great many,” Lyon answered softly. “They’re going to want to know if you were aware that Dalton had a great deal of money converted into cash.”

  “I knew he had all that money, but he told me that he needed cash to pay off that man who called in the night. They’ll find out about Katrina and Dalton, won’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  Captain Norbert stalked toward them. He glowered at Lyon. “I understand that you found the body? Let me ask you something, Wentworth. How do you manage to find the time to st
umble over half the murder victims in my jurisdiction?”

  “I think it has something to do with my karma, Captain.”

  “It’s because of all the time you have on your hands. Why don’t you get a real job like the rest of us?”

  “Is this employment counseling time, or are you conducting an investigation?”

  “I’ll get your statement later.” He shifted his attention to Pan Turman and as he did his manner changed to that of the polite but firm civil servant. “We’d like your permission to search the premises including all the motor vehicles. We could get a court order, but it would save time if you allowed it.”

  “Sure,” Pan said as she pointed across the compound. “That cottage over there is where I stayed before I went to the Wentworths’. The one next to it was Katrina’s. The cars are all parked up in the lot.”

  Captain Norbert gave her a half-salute and walked away to give orders to a phalanx of patrolmen and detectives.

  “What in the hell’s going on?” Bobby Douglas limped across the grass toward them.

  “When did you get back?” Lyon asked.

  “I just pulled into the parking lot and a dozen troopers crawled all over me. What happened? Did they find Dalton’s body?”

  “Kat’s been killed,” Pan said. “She was on the beach where someone stabbed her.”

  “Katrina dead?” Douglas looked stricken, and as if to punctuate his feelings, ambulance attendants zippered a body bag shut, levered it on a gurney, and pushed it to a waiting ambulance. The vehicle’s doors closed and it pulled slowly away from the resort. Douglas sank slowly to a seat on the seawall.

  “What were you doing at a marina in Delaware?” Lyon asked.

  Douglas looked up at Lyon as the shutters behind his eyes flicked open and shut several times while he decided what to answer. He finally spoke in a hesitant manner with long pauses. “I thought Dalton would be down there. That was sort of the original plan.”

  “What plan?” Lyon asked.

  “The way he had it set up, I was the one supposed to take the boat, and he was to meet me at the marina. We were to sail south and then make a run for one of the Bahamas.”

  “With the cash aboard?”

  “He never said exactly, but that’s the way I figured it. When he and the boat were gone, I thought it was the same plan in reverse, and that he’d want me to meet him. He never showed. I don’t think he made it out of the river.”

  “What did Katrina know?”

  Douglas shrugged. “Who knows? Kat would tell you what she wanted you to know she knew.”

  “You, Douglas.” Captain Norbert was back and held an acetate evidence bag in his hand.

  Bobby didn’t look up at him. “Yeah.”

  “The red eighty-four Ford in the lot yours?”

  “Mine and the bank’s.”

  “This yours?” Norbert shoved the evidence bag at him. “We found it under the seat of your car.” The bag held a yellow spring knife with a narrow, stained blade.

  “Looks like one I have.”

  “Forensic will tell us for sure, but it looks like we got blood on your knife, boy.”

  Douglas shifted uneasily. “I might have cut myself. I eat lots of fruit.”

  “During our investigation of Turman’s disappearance, we ran a make on you, Douglas. We know you had a drug bust in Florida.”

  “For carrying half an ounce of grass, for Chrissake!” Bobby said. “It musta been a slow day for cops that afternoon.”

  “Seems there were going to be more slow days for you after your girl ran away with Turman and his money,” Norbert said. “Or did you take care of that little detail too?”

  “Wait a goddamn minute!” Douglas took a menacing step toward Norbert until the police officer grasped the butt of the weapon holstered at his waist. “I spent sixty days in the can in Florida, and I won’t go through that again.”

  “You have the right to remain silent …” Norbert began in a monotone.

  “Bullshit!” Douglas ran toward the parking lot. His limping stride slowed him somewhat, but his powerful legs still propelled him rapidly toward the red car at the edge of the lot.

  Norbert dropped the evidence bag and held his service revolver in his right hand as his left braced the wrist. He began to lead the barrel after the running man. “Stop! I order you to stop.”

  Lyon glanced at Norbert’s aim expecting to see the revolver’s barrel pointed high in a warning shot. The captain had assumed a marksman’s stance and was still leading the running man with care. It was going to be a carefully aimed, if not fatal, shot.

  “No!” Lyon yelled as the palm of one hand lashed out and struck the police officer in the larynx while the other wrenched the pistol from the captain’s hand.

  Norbert staggered backward clutching his throat. He pointed at the running man and choked out, “Get him!”

  On the far side of the seawall, a State Police officer raised the M-16 he had cradled over his arm and took aim as Bobby Douglas reached for his car door.

  Lyon fired Norbert’s weapon directly at the officer pointing the rifle.

  8

  Lyon hadn’t realized before that most state cops carried blackjacks in their back pockets. His fresh bruises, bloodied nose, and other assorted aches were proof of this new knowledge. The massive shooting pains in his head were of some minor help in that they made him forget lesser pains in other parts of his anatomy.

  After he had fired at the officer sighting the rifle, state cops had descended on him from all directions in massive numbers. They might have killed him if Norbert hadn’t recovered sufficiently to stop the mayhem. Lyon would always be convinced that the State Police captain let the beating continue for a minute or two longer than necessary.

  The small holding cell at the barracks didn’t help his disposition. They had laughed when he’d asked for his single phone call, and they hadn’t bothered to book, photograph, or fingerprint him. He had been dragged unceremoniously from the cruiser, through the communications room, and dumped on the floor of the cell. The door had slammed with a note of finality.

  No one had died, and that was some consolation for the beating. Before he lost consciousness from the attack by the irate troopers, he had seen Douglas taken into custody and the officer he had shot hobble toward a cruiser using his rifle as a crutch. After that, things began to get hazy.

  He swung his legs from the bunk and staggered over to a plumbing fixture that contained a toilet, sink, and built-in mirror all in one unit. His face, reflected in the stainless steel, verified visually how he felt physically. The knowledge that he would probably look worse tomorrow didn’t help.

  All that the narrow cell contained was the plumbing fixture and the bunk. Stools, desks, lamps, and reading matter were evidently not provided to the occupants of holding cells. He assumed that the purpose of this was to make the prisoner contemplate his sins. He flopped back on the bunk and laced his hands behind his head, but even that simple gesture shot tentacles of pain along his arms.

  It was time to go to another place. He had an eclectic memory able to transform past experiences and images into a vivid near-reality. It was a question of roaming through memories and selecting. He decided to view a river trip he and his father had taken on his fourteenth birthday. It had been a Technicolor day, with a warm but not burning sun and a moderate breeze from the north. They had launched the twenty-one-foot sailboat into the Connecticut River at East Hartford. Spring freshets had brimmed the river and the current was brisk. Wind stiffened the sails as they turned into the main channel.

  He meticulously reconstructed the exact details of the trip downriver. The day’s sights were as vivid now as they had been during that day decades ago, but his father’s facial features were beginning to blur, and he wondered why that seemed to happen as the years progressed.

  They sailed to the sea by following the river’s meandering course as it wandered toward the Sound. They passed Middleburg, where years later he would teach at
the University. They drifted past the promontory where he now lived, and finally reached the mouth of the river. They slept on the boat that night, and at dawn were under sail again. They wandered in and out of channels that separated the small islands that occasionally clustered near the shore. They tacked by the lee side of Duck Island and ran before a stiff wind that pushed them rapidly past Red Deer Island, which even then was deserted. They slept that night in a safe anchorage protected by the Thimble Islands.

  The memory covered nearly the identical area that Lyon had Dorset map with his aerial photographs. The whole shore was more densely populated now, and the configurations of some land had changed due to water erosion or storms. The house on Red Deer Island had been destroyed by a hurricane last year, and Duck Island had completely disappeared underwater.

  Lyon’s eyes snapped open to immediately destroy the phantom sailing trip. He stared at the ceiling a moment before catapulting from the bunk to grab the bars on the cell door. “Get me out of here!” His voice echoed in the narrow concrete hallway. “Damn it! Let me out of here!”

  “Shut up!” a voice from another cell yelled back. “We’re trying to sleep.”

  “Psycho time,” another voice added.

  The chant repeating Lyon’s demand began at the cell at the end of the corridor and was quickly taken up by all the prisoners until the din of “Let us out” became ear shattering.

  The single state trooper who entered the hall and growled for quiet was shouted down and soon retreated for reinforcements. Captain Norbert, wearing a bandage around his throat, appeared in the hall flanked by four large troopers. His voice boomed above the din. “Who started this?”

  “The guy in the cell at the end,” someone answered.

  “Wentworth!” Captain Norbert’s voice cracked. “You son of a bitch!”

  Rocco Herbert followed the troopers who followed Norbert as he stalked toward Lyon’s cell. “Leave him alone, Norbie,” Rocco said.

  “Yeah, wait until I finish telling you what this bastard did.” He stopped in front of Lyon and poked an accusing finger through the bars. “Assault, attempted murder, and resisting arrest. And those are just for openers. It’s going to be hard time for you, Wentworth.”