The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  Queenie reached across me and grabbed yet another section of the World. “Yesterday, Dec. 22, was the solstice, the shortest day. And the sun set…” she ran her finger along a column of figures, “at exactly 4:43 p.m. That means that if the guy left at 4 p.m., he would hardly have any time at all to see anything outside.”

  “What did he claim to see?” I asked her.

  “The victim was lying dead just inside the door. The windows were all fogged up, except for a little scraped patch near where somebody, probably the victim, must have stood to look out. There were footprints in blood all around the houseboat.”

  I thought about the scene for a minute. As far as evidence went, it was pretty much the ultimate cliché. “And the footprints led to a smoking gun in the hands of a butler?”

  “Okay, forget it. I got better things to do with my time….” She stood abruptly, sending the pages of the paper sliding to the floor.

  I reached out and pulled her back down beside me. For a few seconds, she glared at me, but I could see the soft light in her eyes. I brushed her lips with my finger. “Lose the frown and keep talking,” I told her. “For starters, tell me about this ‘guy’.”

  “It doesn’t say too much about him except that he is a ‘well-known area retailer’, but I sort of recognize the name. I think he’s the man that runs that antique shop on Queen Street that sells old letters and manuscripts.”

  I thought about that for a moment. I’d been in the store once or twice. It was dusty and smelled vaguely of pipe tobacco and oranges. Not unpleasant, but not to everyone’s taste. “I don’t know how many customers he gets,” I told Queenie. “His prices are high and most of what he sells is pretty arcane.”

  “What?”

  “Rare autographs of obscure people…”

  “Yeah. But worth a mint to collectors, I guess.”

  “I wonder if the police think robbery was a motive,” I said.

  I expected Queenie to consult the paper again, even, perhaps to quote me a phrase or two from whatever the police had said, not that they usually said much on the scene of a crime or at such an early stage in the investigation.

  “All the police say is that the victim was the guy’s wife and that she died from stab wounds.”

  “Stabbed with…?”

  “That’s the thing,” Queenie said. “The reporter found out that there wasn’t any weapon left at the scene. Anyway—” She took a slow sip of her drink and eyed me over the rim of the glass.

  “Anyway, I’m the one who’s supposed to figure this out?”

  She smiled.

  “I don’t suppose you expect me to get on my parka and go down there and look around?”

  She seemed genuinely surprised at this suggestion. I was surprised at her surprise. What exactly did she want?

  “A long time ago,” she said, “when you were helping me to read some of the books you like so much, we read a story about that guy who solved mysteries just sitting in a chair.”

  I had to ponder that one for a moment before I figured out what she meant. “Mycroft Holmes?” I finally said. “Sherlock’s brother?”

  “Yeah. That’s the one.”

  “So you want me to solve this murder the way Mycroft would?”

  Queenie nodded.

  I stood up and stretched, gazing out at the gathering darkness and the thickening snow.

  When I turned back toward the room, Queenie was looking up at me with an irresistible air of expectation.

  “Okay,” I said. “A man goes Christmas shopping and returns at dusk. He finds bloody footprints and a wife stabbed. He calls the police. They arrive and find the scene as he described it, but there’s no weapon. Also, no motive is immediately apparent, though robbery is a possibility since the man has access to valuable documents and is widely known as a person likely to possess such things.”

  “Right.”

  “The man and the victim live in a houseboat. All year long?”

  “Yes,” Queenie answered. I neglected to ask her how she knew this.

  “So the two of them live in a confined space. It’s Christmas, a difficult time of the year, especially if money is tight because you run a shop with a very limited clientele and what you sell isn’t exactly giftware.”

  “Yeah.”

  I kept silent for a moment, considering various possibilities. “Okay,” I said, “let’s say you’re a thief. You live in the neighborhood either of the store or of the houseboats or both.”

  “And…”

  “Both of those places—Queen Street where the store is and the Scarborough Bluffs where the boats are—both of those places are mixed neighborhoods, aren’t they?”

  “Mixed? You mean rich people and people who aren’t rich live there together?”

  “Yes. But it’s a little more complicated than that. As you yourself pointed out, in some neighborhoods in the city, people who are genuinely rich and people who only appear to be rich live side by side.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So there’s tension—economic conflict, of course. But also the conflict of keeping up appearances.”

  “Well,” Queenie said, “that could sure cause somebody to want to rob somebody else.”

  “True. But the need to save face leads to other problems as well.”

  “Like what?”

  Queenie was a person who’d risen from a life on the streets to a position of prominence in our community as a tireless defender and servant of the poor, but she had as much pretension as a cabbage. Which was one of a million things I loved about her. I, however, had often been accused of having a high idea of myself. I knew a lot about saving face.

  “It takes money to pretend you have money,” I answered. “That means there could be arguments between a husband and wife if they disagreed about how their limited funds should be spent.”

  “All show and no go…” Queenie commented. She loved the pithy sayings of the street people she served.

  “Something like that.”

  “So you don’t think this was a robbery?”

  “Queenie,” I said, coming back to sit beside her, “the fact that no weapon was found means nothing. If the killer was a robber, he might have fled, taking the weapon with him. He might have tossed it.”

  “The lake was frozen. Even down by the boats. We saw it ourselves the other day. And it’s been real cold ever since.”

  “He didn’t need to toss it in water. He could have tossed it into a trash can, into the woods, even onto the road. There’s so much slush from the ice and the salt….”

  “Or the weapon could be something else,” she said quietly.

  “Something else?”

  She picked up the paper and studied the photo. I leaned over and studied it, too. It was grainy. You could see the body and beside where it lay, you could see what looked like a little pile of ice, as though it had been chipped away from a window—or a path.

  “If the killer was a robber,” Queenie said, “he picked a stupid time.”

  “Broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. If the robber thought the couple had money or something else valuable and kept it in the boat, why wouldn’t he come at a time when nobody was home? He could see that a person was there if it was broad daylight, don’t you think?

  “There’s another thing,” Queenie said. “This guy, he didn’t have anybody working with him in the store, did he?”

  “I can’t say. I was only there two or three times. Maybe he hired somebody for Christmas.”

  “That’s just it,” Queenie said. “The middle of the last Saturday before Christmas is a dumb time for a store to be left unattended by a ‘well-known area retailer’!” She wrinkled her face in a gesture of disbelieving contempt.

  Our fireside “investigation” ground to a halt. On the stereo, one disc ended and another fell into place. Queenie seemed to have an endless supply of carol renditions. The choir was replaced by a smooth-voiced tenor
crooning Silent Night. Outside our window, it had suddenly become night, all traces of snow erased by the warm reflection of our home in the depths of the cold window glass.

  I thought about that little pile of chipped ice beside the body.

  And then I understood.

  I had no idea what had really happened to the manuscript merchant’s wife.

  But I knew what Queenie thought had happened. And I knew why she cared so much.

  “They sold everything they owned for the pearl of great price—that boat,” I said, keeping my eyes on the fire. “Maybe they were both excited by the idea, at least at first. They took ownership of the boat in the spring when the trees on the bluffs were just beginning to come back to life after a long winter of being covered with ice—the frozen mists off the lake. The two of them worked together to set up their new home. It didn’t matter that that was all they had because they loved it. As spring turned to summer, the birds returned. The white gulls soared in freedom over the water. The Canada geese spread their wide returning vees over the beaches.

  “It wasn’t hard in summer to look like you had as much money as anybody else, because who down by the bluffs dresses in anything but deck clothes in the summer? Besides, summer is the time a retailer is most likely to sell arcane wares to tourists on a street like Queen East.”

  Queenie said nothing. I took a sip from my glass and went on.

  “But when autumn comes, things begin to change. A person—a couple—begins to need to spend most of their time inside. No more barbecues on the deck. Fewer walks along the beach. If you entertain often, as the rich do, you entertain at good restaurants. Or better, at your private club. If you accept an invitation, you also accept the obligation to reciprocate.

  “It becomes harder and harder to hide the fact that the money is running out.”

  I looked around our own home. The marble fireplace with its brass accoutrements, the mahogany bookcases, the paintings… We were blessed in that our finances were secure. But that had not always been the case. Not by a long shot. So both Queenie and I understood what it meant to be poor. The additional burden of having to pretend otherwise must have proven excruciating.

  I continued my narrative, my speculation.

  “Tensions mount. Ironically, the poorer the couple becomes, the more time they have to spend together in the cramped confines of their boat. Under such circumstances, many unpleasant things become clear, such as, for example, the inevitable accusation…”

  “This was all your big idea…” Queenie offered.

  I smiled despite the grimness of the tale. “Right. Sooner or later, the husband or the wife comes to the conclusion that all of their troubles result from some decision, some desire, on the part of the other.”

  “And then there’s a fight.”

  “A man comes home when he should be working. Or a woman is doing things like scraping ice instead of looking for a job,” I said. “Whatever the words exchanged, there’s an escalation.”

  “And there’s a weapon. A kitchen knife or something?” Queenie asked.

  “No.” I pointed to the photo. I could see understanding dawn on her face.

  “Water like a stone…”

  “He picks up a heavy shard of ice. The lake has been frozen solid for a long time. He stabs her. Again and again. Then he goes into the kitchen and washes the weapon down the sink.”

  The horror of the idea penetrated the peace of the afternoon and stunned us into a silence interrupted only by a sudden fall of embers in the fireplace.

  “But you knew that, Queenie.”

  “What? I didn’t know about that ice part.”

  “No. But you figured out that he was the one who killed her and you figured out why.”

  She didn’t look at me. “How do you know that?” she asked softly.

  “The pearl of great price? The fact that somebody ‘threw everything away’…”

  She nodded.

  I took her hand and held it close to my chest. “Queenie,” I asked, “why did you put me through my paces? Did you need to prove I still have what it takes?”

  Now she did look at me. I could see the love in her eyes, “You’ll always have what it takes, Your Honor,” she said, “but…”

  “But what?”

  “But maybe I won’t always have what it takes. I’m not young anymore, or brilliant or…”

  “Queenie,” I said, “what we have here—our home—it’s not based on a lie or a wish we can’t fulfill or a drama we have to act out. Our home is based on our love.”

  “But anybody can have a disagreement.”

  “Of course.”

  “And anybody can have a fight.”

  “Right again.”

  “But—” She lifted our entwined hands, turned them over and softly kissed my palm. “But we would never…”

  I could have answered that we never angered each other in the least. I could have told her that I loved her more than I loved myself. I could have observed that in my long career as a judge I’d come to the conclusion that domestic violence is not merely the result of a sudden change of fortune.

  But all I needed to say, did say was, “No.”

  GIFTS

  Sammy stuck out his hand as if he expected me to shake it. I didn’t do a double take or anything like that. I’ve been a lawyer now for nearly twenty years, and I’m as good at keeping emotion out of my face as a cop, a poker player or a nun. But all the same, Sammy could tell I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I motioned toward one of the wing-chairs in front of my desk. “Please…”

  Sammy sat, but he kept his slender body on the edge of the seat, as if he were afraid to soil it somehow.

  “Relax,” I said, “take it easy. Have some wine…” I reached over to the carafe and poured him a small glass of sweet vermouth.

  “Grazie,” he said softly, then sank back into the chair. He rested his head against the leather. I noticed that his perfectly cut gray hair was thin. In the first memory I have of Sammy, his hair was a black, curly bush. “Your Uncle Sammy looks like Groucho Marx,” my grandmother had commented.

  There’s never been a time when he hadn’t been in my life—from the days when he’d told me bedtime stories to the day I’d gotten charges against him dropped (the heaviest charge of his long criminal career: homicide), to today when my frantic mother had called me with the news.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” I asked him. I poured myself a drink, then came around and sat on the corner of my desk. It was late afternoon and a ray of sunlight bounced off the glass door of one of my bookcases and spread its reflected flush across the rug, making its pattern look blurry and vague. Sammy looked vague, too, staring at the rug instead of looking me in the eye as we talked.

  It was a trick of Sammy’s trade to be able to look a person straight in the eye no matter what. It seemed to be failing him now.

  “I done precisely as you instructed,” he said. “I flew to Boston. I called on your mother. I told her and your father that I’d been sent to give them a special gift for their fortieth anniversary….”

  “Nobody stopped you, did they?” I tried not to sound alarmed.

  “Nah, Marky. Nobody stopped me. You had that right. I sailed through customs like a ship. Just the way you said I would. Once I reached Logan, I felt sure everything was going to be just fine. I had a redcap handle the baggage. I can’t—I mean I couldn’t—manage to carry much, as you are aware.”

  Over the years, Sammy had done a pretty good job of teaching himself to behave and speak like an educated man. He slipped once in a while, but for the most part when he was doing business, he was nearly perfect. His speech patterns had been honed by years of bending the ears of his victims, dazzling them until they stopped paying attention just long enough for Sammy to slide them over the line and into the red.

  “At first,” he said, “your mother was a little wary. It’s understandable. She never forgave me for what happened to your Aunt Mary’s pension.”
/>
  “That’s water under the bridge, now, Sammy. Put it behind you. Aunt Mary’s dead.”

  He nodded, but he still didn’t look up.

  “She took my word for it that I’m straight now, that I’m working for you. She seemed doubtful. Maybe she had some sort of inkling or something. Of course, I didn’t tell your mother anything about what was going on here—I mean about why it was a good idea for me to get away for a while.” Sammy swallowed, almost as if he were choking something back.

  I poured him a bit more vermouth and topped up my own.

  “I didn’t tell her about somebody killing that guy in my building. I mean there was no reason to tell anybody, was there? I wasn’t a suspect, was I, Marky? I had a bullet-proof alibi. You said so yourself.”

  I reached across and touched Sammy’s shoulder. Without warning, my mind flashed back to the first time I’d ever done that. It was while I was still articling—working on bail cases. I’d gone into a police lock-up and he’d been there, awaiting a show-cause. I’d never seen him down and out before. My mother told me he was a businessman. She’d just neglected to mention the business.

  Now he reached up and grabbed my fingers in his own. I almost jumped. But I knew just from his touch that it was his good hand that he’d used.

  “You aren’t a suspect,” I told him. “No one can accuse you of killing that man, even though you were the last person to see him alive and the only other tenant of the small apartment building home at the time the police figure he was strangled. Clearly, it would have taken a man with two strong hands.”

  Now he looked up. His eyes held something I’d never seen there before: terror.

  “It’s my whole life, Marky,” he said in the modulated tones that had calmed many a wealthy widow. “I’ve wasted my whole life. And now, near the end of it, when I finally have the chance to finish up as a respectable person with a little dignity…Now this.”

  He held up his hand, the long straight fingers, the firm palm, the supple wrist. “And now, this…”

  For a moment, we just sat there in silence. The sun, with the slowness of late spring, shifted to amber, then rust. Then the air in my office seemed to become a soft blue, like the stained-glass wings of angels. I turned on a lamp.