by J. A. Jance
This time I led the way. After climbing back up the ladder, I stood by the smashed hatch and offered each of the four women a gentlemanly hand up as they followed me out. Only Marian Rockwell, agile as a cat, refused my offer.
Once she, too, was out of the fo'c'sle, Janice Morraine resumed command. She herded us all off the boat and onto the wooden pier.
"I want undisturbed pictures of the entire boat before anyone else goes back on deck," she said. "Somebody call downtown and see where the hell that damned photographer is. He should be here by now. Anybody got a cigarette?"
While she and Sue Danielson set about lighting up, I marched purposefully off down the dock, intent on tracking down Janice Morraine's missing photographer. I didn't have to go far. The "he" in question turned out to be another she-Nancy Gresham, a talented young woman who has been taking pictures for the Seattle Police Department for several years now. I met her hurrying down the dock, carrying her camera and a box of equipment.
She turned down my gentlemanly offer to carry her case. "Don't bother," she said. "I can manage."
"Suit yourself."
Nancy looked up into my eyes. "I was talking to one of the firemen on the way in," she said. "How bad is it?"
"About as bad as I ever remember," I told her.
"Coming from you, that's saying something," she returned.
"I guess it is," I agreed. And it was.
She continued on down the dock toward the Isolde, and I made as if to follow her, but Officer Casey, one of the patrol officers, came puffing down the dock. "Hey, Detective Beaumont," he said. "We've got a little problem here."
"What's that?"
He motioned with his head back down the dock to where another officer was manning the barricade. "There's a woman down there," he said.
"A woman?" I returned, trying to inject a little humor into what was an impossibly humorless situation. "Why would that be a problem? The place seems to be crawling with them. They're all doing their jobs."
Casey looked uncomfortable. "I know," he said in a way that told me he had missed the joke entirely. "You don't understand. She says she's his wife."
"Whose wife?"
"The dead man's," Casey answered. "Or at least I guess it's him. She says her husband is the owner of the boat. She wants to go on board. When I told her that was impossible, she went ballistic on me. Would you come talk to her, Detective Beaumont? Please?"
I followed Casey back down to the barricade, where a young officer named Robert Tamaguchi was arguing with a heavyset woman who towered over the diminutive officer by a good foot. Long before I reached the end of the dock, I heard the sound of raised voices.
"What do you mean, I can't go on board?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am," Officer Tamaguchi insisted placatingly, keeping his voice calm, reasonable, and businesslike. "This is a police matter. No one at all is allowed on board."
"A police matter!" the woman repeated indignantly. "You don't understand. The Isolde is my husband's boat. My boat. I want to see what's happened to it. You have no right…"
I walked over to the barricade. "Mrs. Gebhardt?" I asked uncertainly.
A tall, thick-waisted woman with fierce, bright blue eyes and a long woolen coat to match looked angrily away from Tamaguchi and zeroed in on me.
"I want to know exactly what's going on here," she declared. "I understand there's been a fire. I can see that. But why won't this policeman let me see what's happened to my own boat? And where's Gunter? He has to be here somewhere. His truck was out front in the lot."
Behind the woman's heavy, angry features, there was a hint of someone I recognized, the shadow of someone I knew but couldn't quite place.
"And who are you?" she demanded shrilly. "Are you in charge, or should I talk to someone else? One way or the other, I'm going to find out what's happened."
Two distinct red splotches of irritation and anger spread out from both prominent cheekbones. With nostrils flaring and both hands glued to her hips, she looked fully prepared to take on all comers. She glowered at me, waiting for me to let her have her own way.
"I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Mrs. Gebhardt," I said quietly, moving toward her, reaching in my pocket, pulling out my I.D. I held it up to her, but she stared across it without ever allowing her eyes to leave my face.
"What kind of bad news?"
"A dead man was found on board your boat about an hour ago now. It's possible he's your husband."
One hand flew unconsciously to her breast. "His heart," she murmured, eyes wide. "It must have been Gunter's heart. I've told him time and again that he had to lose weight. I tried to tell him it was bad for him to go on living the way he always had with all that butter on his bread and all those mashed potatoes. I tried to tell him he needed to go to the doctor to be checked out, get some exercise…"
"I'm afraid it wasn't like that at all," I said.
"Wasn't like what?"
"The man on the boat didn't die of a heart attack, Mrs. Gebhardt. We believe he was murdered."
"Murdered!" she echoed in shocked disbelief. "That can't be."
"But it is. The investigators are down there now-taking photographs, gathering evidence."
"Else…" someone said tentatively behind her.
Mrs. Gebhardt spun around. A man stepped up out of the clutch of fishermen behind her. He was tall and lean and wearing a blue baseball-style cap with a Ballard Oil Company logo on the front. Worn Levis were held in place by a pair of wide red suspenders. The arms of his faded, still vaguely plaid flannel shirt were cut off halfway between the elbows and wrist.
"Alan?" she wailed in despair, moving toward him as she spoke. "Did you hear what he said? This man says Gunter may be dead. It isn't true, is it? It can't be true!"
"I didn't say we knew for sure," I corrected. "It is her husband's boat, though, and there is a dead man on board."
Else Gebhardt fell against the newcomer's chest. He gathered her to him with one hand and whipped off the cap with the other. As soon as he did so, I recognized him, even after all the intervening years. Alan Torvoldsen's ducktail was missing. In fact, only the smallest fringe of russet-colored hair remained in a two-inch-wide border from just over his ears and around the base of his skull.
"Al?" I said doubtfully. "Alan Torvoldsen? Is that you?"
He cocked his head momentarily, then a broad grin creased his face. "Beaumont? I'll be damned if it isn't J. P. Beaumont! Damned if it isn't!" He slapped the cap back on his balding head and then reached out to pump my hand. "What the hell are you doing here?"
I held out my I.D. close enough so he could see it, and he nodded. "That's it," he said. "You're a cop. I remember seeing the name in the papers. I kinda wondered if it wasn't you."
"It's me, all right," I said.
And then I looked at Else Gebhardt, sobbing brokenheartedly on Alan Torvoldsen's shoulder. I remembered Else Didricksen then; remembered her from years gone by as a tall, slender girl-a talented athlete in the days long before there had been any collegiate basketball programs for girls. There were few girl players back then, and even fewer scholarships.
I remembered that Else had started school at the U-Dub, as locals affectionately call the University of Washington, two years ahead of me, but I didn't remember ever seeing her on campus once I arrived there, nor did I remember hearing that she had finished.
"Else?" I asked. "Is this Else Didricksen?"
"Yeah," Alan murmured. "Look who it is, Else," he said, taking the weeping woman by the shoulders and bodily turning her around to face me.
"You remember this guy, don't you, Else?" Alan continued. "Jonas Beaumont. He was just a little pipsqueak of a sophomore the year we were seniors, but he was already a damn fine basketball player. Give him the ball, and he could run and jump like a damn jackrabbit."
Else Gebhardt looked up at me. "BoBo?" she said uncertainly.
It was the name that one year's batch of cheerleaders had stuck me with-a relic I had thought buried i
n my past right along with my given name of Jonas.
"That's right," I admitted reluctantly. "BoBo Beaumont. It's me, all right."
Although her bright blue eyes were wild with grief, Else Gebhardt smiled at me through her tears. Her hands sought mine. "Please, BoBo," she pleaded. "Just let me on the boat long enough to see if it's Gunter. I have to know."
"I'm not sure you should go anywhere near it," I answered dubiously. "The man on board-if he is your husband-has been burned very badly. You may not even be able to recognize him."
"I'll recognize him all right," she said determinedly.
In the end, we compromised. At my direction, the two uniformed officers reluctantly allowed both Else Gebhardt and Alan Torvoldsen past the crime-scene perimeter and onto the dock. I figured there wasn't that much of a problem. It didn't seem the least bit likely that Janice Morraine would allow Gunter Gebhardt's widow access to the burned-out boat, and I was right about that. Janice didn't.
While Else waited on the dock, Janice Morraine brought one of Nancy Gresham's police photos over to the side of the boat. The grisly Polaroid close-up she handed over to Else showed nothing but the dead man's face. For a long moment after Janice placed the small color photo in Else's hand, she didn't look down at it. Once she was actually holding the proof she had demanded, it seemed as though she couldn't quite summon the courage to look at it.
At last, though, she dropped her gaze and held the picture out far enough from her so she could see it clearly. Time seemed to stand still on the dock. There was no sound at all and no movement. Then Else Gebhardt's features seemed to fall out of focus, and she fainted dead away.
Luckily, Alan Torvoldsen was there to catch her. I'm not sure anyone of the rest of us could have managed. None of the rest of us were strong enough-with the possible exception of Marian Rockwell.
3
Women don't seem to faint as much as they used to, at least not as much as they did in the old black-and-white movies my mother watched on TV once she was too sick to sew anymore. She spent countless sleepless nights in the company of one late movie after another.
And in those old thirties movies, when one of those pencil-thin female stars keeled over, there was always a strong leading man to catch her on the way down and deposit her on the nearest bed or couch, depending upon whether or not they were married at the time. My guess, though, is that none of those silver-screen beauties weighed nearly as much as Else Gebhardt.
The woman stood six-something in her stocking feet. Stark naked, she would have outweighed me by a good thirty to forty pounds. She outweighed Alan Torvoldsen, too, especially considering the full-length wool coat, but Champagne Al didn't seem to notice. He simply swept her up into his arms and strode off down the dock. Janice Morraine bent down and retrieved the picture before the wind blew the photo into the water, while I trailed off after Alan and Else.
"Where are you taking her?" I asked.
"To my boat," Alan grunted. "She needs a place to lie down."
"How far is it?" I asked.
His jaw stiffened with exertion and effort. "Just over there," he said, motioning with his head toward the next dock. "It's not far."
Maybe not as the crow flies, it wasn't far. Hitting a tennis ball, from one dock to another, even I could have managed it. But for a man carrying more than his own weight, down half the length of one dock and halfway up the other, it was a hell of a long way. Still, that's one thing I remember about Champagne Al from way back before he even had that name. He was always stubborn as hell. Stubborn and tough.
By the time we started up the other dock, beads of sweat popped out on Alan's brow. Else had come to and was already arguing. "Put me down," she insisted. "I'm all right. I can walk."
"I'll put you down when I'm good and ready," Alan Torvoldsen replied.
He finally stopped in front of one of the ugliest excuses for a fishing boat I had ever seen. Instead of the graceful old Torvoldsen family schooner Norwegian Princess, this was an old steel-hulled, T-Boat-class army lighter trying to pass itself off as a respectable member of the fishing fleet. The name of the boat was newly lettered on the stern- One Day at a Time. That name told me a whole lot about where Champagne Al might be coming from as well as where he'd been during the almost thirty years between then and the time when we'd been schoolmates together at Ballard High.
"Here," he said, setting the protesting Else down on her feet and turning to me. By then his whole face was drenched in sweat. Rivulets rolled down the back of his bald head and neck. He took off the cap and scrubbed away the perspiration with the sleeve of his shirt. "You hold on to her until I hop aboard," he ordered. "Then we'll both help her over the rail."
"I don't need any help," Else asserted, but she wasn't able to deliver. As soon as she tried to move under her own power, the wooziness returned, and once again she leaned against Alan for support.
In the end, it took both of us to help her climb aboard One Day at a Time. As he led her toward the galley aft of the pilothouse, I heard Alan Torvoldsen mumble something about "…one stubborn damn woman."
And although the remark was true as far as Else was concerned, I don't think Alan Torvoldsen had a whole lot of room to talk.
I climbed aboard and followed both of them into the galley, where I found Else Gebhardt seated on a narrow bench beside a tiny, bolted-down, Formica-topped table. She sat there with her elbows resting on the table and her hands clasped tightly to her face. It looked to me as though she was using her hands and fingers to physically hold back tears.
Without a word, Alan opened a locked cabinet with a key and took out a bottle of aquavit. Silently, he poured a generous shot into a glass and then placed it on the table next to Else's right elbow. Then he turned to me, one eyebrow raised and questioning.
I remember trying some of that potent stuff long ago. I know the heart-pounding, head-zinging rush. Even back in my most capable drinking days, I couldn't handle aquavit. "None for me," I said. "I'm working."
Champagne Al nodded sagely, returned the bottle to the cabinet, and turned the key in the lock.
"Drink it, Else," he told her kindly. "You need it."
But when Else Didricksen Gebhardt dropped her hands away from her face, there were no tears visible. Strangely enough, her grief seemed beyond tears. Shock works that way sometimes. Her face was pale, verging on gray, and the fierce blue light in her eyes had faded. She stared dully at the shot glass of liquor without making any effort to pick it up, almost without recognizing what it was.
"How is it possible?" she murmured. "Who would do such a thing?"
If she was expecting an audible answer to either of those two rhetorical questions, none was forthcoming-not from Champagne Al, and not from me, either.
Turning his back to her, Alan fiddled with the control on the galley stove, removed the cover plate, and then waited. When the well in the bottom of the stove filled with fuel, he lit one end of a twisted-up paper towel and used that to light the stove. Once satisfied that the fire was properly started, he replaced the cover, set a grimy coffeepot to heat, then turned back to Else, who had yet to touch her glass.
Alan studied her for some time but said nothing. Finally, he plucked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, withdrew one smoke, and lit it with a wooden match he struck on his pants leg. He dropped the used match into a chipped, broken-handled coffee mug that was filled to within an inch of the top with an accumulation of ashes, spent matches, and dead cigarette butts.
Leaning impassively against the sink, Alan exhaled a plume of unfiltered Camel cigarette smoke that quickly filled the small galley. He seemed disinclined to say anything at all to break what was fast becoming an unnervingly long silence.
"I finally got Gunter to stop smoking," Else whispered sadly. "That seems pretty silly now, doesn't it? Stopping smoking may prevent lung cancer, but it doesn't make much difference if someone decides to murder you."
With no more warning than that, Else Gebhardt's tears returned. Whe
n two of them slipped silently onto the table, she quickly wiped them away. Meanwhile, Alan Torvoldsen remained oddly silent. It seemed as though the effort of carrying Else from one dock to the other had somehow robbed him of the ability to speak. Or the need.
"He was a good man, Alan," Else continued softly, her glance searching Alan's impassive face. "Gunter was a lot like you, you know," she added. "I've always been sorry about what happened. I'm sorry you two could never be friends. I think you would have liked him."
Alan Torvoldsen's eyes narrowed in a look that might have been anger or anguish, I couldn't tell which, and the fleeting expression disappeared before I had a chance to catalog it. With his eyes once more carefully veiled, he stared off over the disheveled graying hair on Else's once-blond head. His distant gaze seemed to drill a hole deep into the smoke-yellowed, years-old pinup calendar tacked to the bulkhead above and behind her.
The stark, empty expression on his face wasn't suitable for casual indoor use, or for mixed company, either. It came uncomfortably close to the thousand-yard stare I've seen occasionally on the faces of Vietnam vets who are going down for the count, unfortunate losers who are trapped in that crazed, memory-filled catch-all mental health professionals call Delayed Stress Syndrome.
Forgotten between his fingers, Alan's smoldering cigarette dribbled a trail of gray ashes across the already ash-strewn galley floor. When he noticed it finally, he shook the rest off into the mug-turned-ashtray he still held in his other hand.
"We won't ever know that now, will we, Else, so you could just as well forget it," he returned darkly. "Drink your drink."
The comment seemed blunt and unkind, and it was barked out more as a command than an invitation. Else's fingers inched uncertainly toward the glass. When her fingertips finally touched it, she looked up at him. "I'm sorry it happened," she said, "but thank you."