Everybody Called Her a Saint

by Cecil Murphey

  “Twelve,” he said.

  I walked in first, and Jon came in right behind me. “I gotta see this. I gotta see you find something that isn’t in my cabin.”

  Burton and the captain flanked each other and followed. The sea was still rough, so I held on to the guardrail. Jon saw me turn my head and look at him, so he tried to tough it out, but about the fifth step, he lurched forward and grabbed the railing just before he fell. Burton hugged the rail without trying to prove anything. The captain must have had what the sailors call sea legs. I looked back and saw that his body made the slightest weight adjustment with each step he took. It wasn’t a conscious shift, but I assume it had come after years of sailing across the Weddell Sea.

  The captain opened the door to cabin twelve. Jeff Adams lay on his back in his bunk. He had a book in his hand, but I think he had been asleep. “Please let us have the room for a few minutes,” the captain said.

  Jeff’s gaze shifted from one of us to the other before he got out of bed. He grabbed his book and left without saying anything.

  “Let the captain search,” I told Burton. “If he finds the evidence, Jon can never say we planted it.”

  “There is nothing to find! Nothing to find! Nothing to find!” Jon yelled. “All this accusation and there’s nothing to find!”

  “Sit on Jeff’s bunk.” Burton’s strong voice implied that it was not a matter for discussion.

  Jon sat quietly with an expression somewhere between a smirk and a grin as the captain searched. I had the utmost certainty that the evidence was in Jon’s cabin. The camera was small, but I was sure we would find it.

  Without his being aware, from the corner of my eye, I followed Jon’s gaze. His eyes flared briefly when the captain picked up the shaving kit, opened it, saw nothing, and put it down.

  Jon relaxed. “Keep looking. Do you plan to spend the night?”

  “Captain, empty everything from the shaving kit onto the bunk,” I said.

  Without asking the reason, the captain did so. He began to sort through everything. Then I saw it.

  Now it was my turn to smirk.

  Forty

  Jon didn’t have a camera. I assumed he had thrown Heather’s away. That had been a smart move. In a small plastic bag was a black object about the size of a postage stamp.

  “That’s the evidence,” I said and pointed to the object.

  “What is it?” asked the captain.

  Jon closed his eyes.

  “It is the camera’s memory card,” Burton said.

  “It’s so small,” I said, “Jon wouldn’t have had any trouble getting ashore with that.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Burton said. “We had expected to find Heather’s camera, but I’m sure we can find someone on the ship with a digital camera that this memory card will fit.”

  “They’re fairly universal,” I said. “So you shouldn’t have a problem.”

  “I’ll make an announcement and ask anyone with a digital camera to bring it to the theater.” The captain turned to Jon. “Sit. You can’t run away, so just sit on this bunk until I return.”

  Jon sat in a hunched position, his eyes closed.

  The captain left the room.

  Less than two minutes later, the captain made the announcement over the intercom. Perhaps another ten minutes passed before he came back to the cabin with four digital cameras. The memory card fit in the third one.

  We turned on the camera and stared at what we saw. Heather had taken perhaps a dozen pictures at Brown Bluff. We were particularly interested in six of them. The first showed two figures, dressed in blue, walking toward the hillock. One of them was taller and wore his life jacket. The next picture was about the same, but in the third one, Jon had grabbed Twila’s arm and we could see his profile and hers.

  The fourth picture showed them walking over the rise. In the fifth picture, Jon had turned his face and we clearly saw him. He was coming back alone. He wasn’t wearing a life jacket. In the sixth frame, we had a clearer view of his face. The time frame at the bottom told us that the entire ordeal had taken slightly under seven minutes.

  “Do you wish to tell us what happened?” the captain asked.

  Jon hugged his body and pulled his legs in tightly on the bunk. He rolled over and lay in the fetal position.

  “I’ll explain it, then,” I said and turned to Captain Robert. “You have the right to correct me, Jon, if I’m wrong.”

  He remained in the fetal position with his eyes closed.

  “I have to guess about a few things—I mean, up until the killing. That much we can prove.”

  “No question about that,” Captain Robert said. “I shall be most happy to write a deposition for you.”

  I thanked him and said, “Here’s what happened.” I smiled because I was sure I must have sounded exactly like Jessica Fletcher as she explained how she put the clues together to catch the culprit.

  “It began with a simple assumption: Jon wrongly assumed that Twila had included him in the book.” I paused and said, “I’m not sure why—maybe he was angry because he didn’t like the way he assumed she portrayed him.”

  “You have no idea, do you?” Jon said, but he didn’t move.

  “No, but I’m sure it was something trivial.” I gazed at Burton. The shocked look on his face made me feel good. “Something more normal people wouldn’t have thought twice about.”

  “Trivial? If only you knew,” Jon said.

  “Maybe we’re not bright enough to figure it out,” Burton said. “But nothing is important enough to kill for.”

  I wanted to see if I could make a Jessica Fletcher script actually happen, so I said, “After all, you are a mental patient.”

  “I was. I’m cured.”

  “Oh, that’s what the nutcases say?”

  Burton’s mouth opened, but he caught on and said nothing.

  “You think you know just about everything, don’t you?” Jon sat up in bed. “You have no idea why I killed her.”

  “The book—your mistaken assumption—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said.

  “What did you mean?”

  “She knew. I thought she would tell.”

  “Knew what?” I feigned indifference. “It couldn’t have been much—”

  “I loved you, did you know that?” Jon yelled. “I loved you. I was willing to marry you!”

  Now I knew he really was a borderline personality. I sat down on the bunk beside him. “And I’m not worthy of your love. Right?”

  “Just like the others,” he said, and he focused on me with that unblinking stare.

  I heard something—something ominous—in the way he said, “Just like the others.” Any good therapist automatically listens to the tone of the voice, perhaps even more than the words. “What about the others?” I said in my quiet, professional voice. “Twila found out, didn’t she?”

  He nodded.

  “How did she find out?”

  “I did something stupid—I mean, really, really stupid.”

  “You told her? Is that it?”

  “How did you know?”

  I didn’t know, but I was trusting my intuitive sense on this one. “She was your doctor, and you felt you could trust her . . . that she’d never tell . . . and you were safe.”

  “That’s exactly right! She led me on! She made me feel I could say anything, and I would be safe.”

  “But weren’t you safe? Did she betray you in some way?”

  “Worse.”

  I must have frowned, because I was momentarily lost.

  “So you don’t know everything, do you?”

  “She may not be as bright as you are,” Burton said. He spoke with exactly the right tone that invited trust.

  “I told her—about the others—about my first three wives—”

  “That you killed them?” Those words just slipped out of my mouth, but as I said them, I knew they were right.

  “Yes, I killed them. Do you want to know
how I did it? No one suspected me. I was far, far more clever than the police.”

  I didn’t want to know, but Burton said, still in that calm voice, “Yes, tell us how you outwitted everyone.”

  Jon got up and paced the small cabin. Paced may not be the correct word, but his movement reminded me of the way a lion walks around in a cage. He spoke faster and faster, and at times Burton calmly asked him to say something again.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” Jon said.

  “Oh, that it is,” I said perhaps a little too skeptically, but he didn’t catch the sarcasm in my voice.

  He had married three times and in three different parts of the country. The marriages started fine, but (in his words) in each case his wife became difficult and constantly nagged him. They fought. He beat up the first one, and she called the police. He knew he had to be careful. So he made up with her. “She believed me.” They lived in Colorado and decided to sell everything and move to Florida.

  He killed her along the way, weighted down her body, and dropped her off a bridge along the Mississippi River. He moved, instead of Florida, to Kentucky. The second wife he dumped in the Ohio River. For the third wife, he rented a motorboat at St. Petersburg and pushed her off into the Gulf of Mexico.

  He went into vivid detail about what he had done, explaining that no one had ever tracked him down. He wrote to friends in various places and told them that his wife had met someone else and left him.

  “But I made one big, big, stupid, stupid mistake: I trusted Twila.”

  “Did she threaten to turn you in?” I asked.

  “No, she couldn’t do that.” He winked. “Doctor-client privilege.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But she bugged me again and again. ‘You need to make this right,’ she would say to me. Almost every time she saw me, she said something like that. But I fixed her—”

  I was ready to say, “So you killed her?” but I hesitated.

  “No, see, I planned to take care of her. I smuggled a knife in the bottom of my luggage. I was going to kill her and toss her overboard, but she never walked on the deck alone. When I tried to talk to her, she insisted on sitting in the lounge.”

  He said that after he saw how they did landings on the Vaschenko, it was easy to lure her. On the Zodiac, he whispered to her that he was ready to turn himself in when they got back, but he needed to talk to her about something first.

  He got her away from the others. As they walked along, she began to resist him and said she didn’t believe him. He grabbed her and told her he wouldn’t hurt her. “She believed me then,” he said with a satisfied smile.

  After that it was simple. He stabbed Twila six times to be sure she was gone. He dropped his life jacket next to her body so there wouldn’t be an extra one on the beach and made his way back to the others.

  He saw Heather, but at the time he didn’t realize she had taken his picture. “Or there might have been two bodies left on Brown Bluff.”

  “So you waited until Ivan was distracted on the VHF radio to the ship, got behind him, and said that two passengers were sick and were going back on the third Zodiac.” I stopped and turned to Jon. “How am I doing so far?”

  “You make it sound easy. It worked because I was clever. I had vomited on board the ship before we went. Three people saw me. That was clever, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I would say that showed how cleverly you planned everything.”

  “Ivan was the only weak part of the plan. But it worked easier than I thought.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “You got into the other boat and probably induced your own vomiting again so there would be no question about your being sick,” Burton said.

  “I want to be clear about one thing.” The captain spoke for the first time. “You killed the woman—Ms. Wilson—because of the pictures? Is that not so?”

  “You might as well admit it,” I said. “We have enough circumstantial evidence.”

  “We have everything but an actual picture of the murders taking place,” Burton said.

  “But that’s good enough,” the captain said.

  “So the reason for killing Heather—”

  “Don’t go stupid on me now,” Jon said.

  We stood silently around the bunk. I wasn’t sure what to do next. We had him—I knew that, and so did Burton and the captain.

  “You are saying, then, are you not, that you also took the life of Ms. Wilson?” Captain Robert said.

  He shrugged. “What is it they say about if you’re going to hang for a chicken, you might as well hang for a cow?”

  I had never heard that before and wasn’t sure it made sense. But it didn’t have to make sense to me.

  “All right, I did it,” Jon said in a faint voice. He sounded like a child. “Twila wanted to ruin my life. She was going to put everything about me in her book.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  “You’re not in the book,” Burton added.

  “How do you know that?” His eyes popped open wide, and he stared at me. “What do you mean? Not in the book? How can that be?”

  “Because we have identified all twenty-one people. You’re not one of them.”

  “That is a lie!”

  “I’ll show you.” I poked my hand into my shoulder bag and pulled out the list and held it out to him.

  He snatched the paper from me. His whole head moved as he read down the list.

  “My assumption is that Twila thought you were either too far beyond her help, or—”

  I watched the movement of Jon’s eyes as he read down the page, reached the bottom, and went through the list again. He screamed and wadded up the paper with his left hand and struck out at me with his right.

  Burton grabbed his left hand and twisted his wrist. “Let go of the paper.”

  It didn’t take much pressure before he dropped the single sheet. I folded it. “We know all the information,” I said, “so you couldn’t have destroyed anything significant.”

  Forty-One

  I might as well tell you the rest of Jon Friesen’s story. I hesitated because this honestly sounds like the conclusion of Diagnosis: Murder or Murder, She Wrote where they corner a criminal and he cries out something like “You have to believe me because I didn’t mean . . . ,” or some silly babble. It’s a clear, neat ending for a TV script that has a forty-eight-minute time length for each episode.

  Life isn’t usually that clean; however, in this case Jon finally said he wanted to talk to me. Alone.

  I told Burton it was all right, and the other two went outside the cabin and closed the door.

  “You know I love you, don’t you?’ he asked. “I saw the way you looked at me at church.”

  This was true paranoia speaking, and I sat down on the bunk across from him. He confessed his love to me several times. When I mentioned his affair with Heather, he said, “She meant nothing to me. It was you—only you that I wanted.”

  I believed that he believed his own words right then. In an hour he probably wouldn’t.

  He began to ramble about not trusting people, especially shrinks. “She didn’t turn me in and said she wouldn’t, but she begged me to give myself up. I told her I wasn’t ever going to do it again—you know, hurt anyone.” He rambled then about forgiveness because he had asked God to forgive him, and if what Burton preached was true, he was forgiven.

  I wanted to say that I was sure Burton also pointed out that we have to take responsibility for our wrongdoing and pay the penalty.

  I didn’t.

  He seemed to calm down and said, “You know what she told me?”

  I shook my head.

  “She said I have no conscience!” His voice began to rise again. “Who did she think she was to say that?”

  “Is it true?” I hadn’t meant to say that, but the words popped out.

  He stared blankly at first before he said, “I guess that’s true. I don’t regret killing any of them.”

/>   “So you killed your former wives—”

  “They were an inconvenience—”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  “If only Heather hadn’t been so underhanded and scheming. And demanding. That was the worst part—her demands.”

  “Demands?” I echoed.

  “Yes, she wanted to marry me or—”

  “Oh.” I had no idea what else to say.

  Jon went into another tirade about Heather, and I let him talk. This time it must have gone on for twenty minutes. I didn’t understand it all, but I think he mixed up Heather with his mother and a sister and someone else. Or maybe I just couldn’t follow his nonlinear ranting.

  He finally shut up and sat quietly on his bunk for a few seconds. Then, as if he had flipped the switch, he said, “So that’s over. What’s next?” His voice was as casual as if he asked, “What’s next on the menu?”

  “I know you don’t get it, but this is an extremely sad and painful time for me,” I said. “Twila had only a short time to live, and you killed her.”

  I told him about her cancer.

  He giggled. He actually giggled. “Then I saved her a lot of pain, didn’t I?”

  Burton opened the door just then. The captain and two crewmen were behind him.

  I wouldn’t have killed Jon, but I would have hit him. As it was, I burst into tears and couldn’t stop sobbing for a long time. Burton’s warm, comforting arms finally calmed me. He led me to my cabin. He had Betty bring the doctor, who offered me a tranquilizer. I refused it and lay on my bunk and sobbed as if I could cry out all the pain.

  I cried for peace, but none came.

  After what seemed like hours, exhaustion set in and I felt myself drift slowly to sleep.

  Forty-Two

  When the ship docked at Ushuaia, the Argentinean police stood at the foot of the gangplank, ready to arrest Jon. An American official, who I assumed was the ambassador, was with them. Even though the murder took place in international waters, Thomas said Argentina claimed ownership of that part of the world. “They must decide whether to try him in South America or in North America.” He spat over the side of the ship and added, “For two killings, does it make any difference where the trial happens?”