I could plead ignorance and claim that I’d just heard some vague rumors. But then if Travis questioned Louise Kramer, and Louise testified that she had told me all about the facts of the case, then I might look pretty bad in Travis’s eyes. Plus, by nature I’m just not the sort to lie to the police unless there’s a mighty good reason for doing so.
“I know her name was Hannah Kramer,” I said. “Her parents are on this cruise.”
That ruffled Detective Travis’s previously unflappable demeanor. She said, “They are?”
I nodded. “Yes. They came on it as a sort of…farewell to their daughter, I guess you’d say.”
“That’s just morbid.”
Travis’s display of distaste was one of the first signs of true emotion I’d seen from her. I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Folks grieve in different ways, I guess.”
“Did you know about this before the cruise started?”
I shook my head. “No, not at all. Eddie and Louise Kramer were just names to me, and I’d never even heard of Hannah.”
“I had,” Travis said. “I remember when it happened. I was still working patrol. I hadn’t been promoted to detective yet.”
“I know it happened while the boat was moving, which meant it was during the day. I’m surprised nobody saw anything.”
It was Travis’s turn to shake her head. “No, the Southern Belle had a dinner cruise then. The boat still docked at Hannibal during the afternoon, but that evening it cruised up and down the river so the passengers could dine outside on the deck. It never went very far, just a mile or two upriver and then back down.”
“Sounds romantic.”
Travis shrugged. “Not for Hannah Kramer. But that’s why it was dark when she was killed.” She frowned at me. “I’m supposed to be the one asking questions here.”
I shrugged. “Just talkin’, Detective. But that ought to prove to you that I didn’t know anything about that other case.”
“Unless that’s what you wanted me to think.”
I held up my hands. “Hey, I’d never been on this boat before yesterday. And a year ago I was in Atlanta.”
“I suppose you can prove that.”
I thought back for a second, then said, “As a matter of fact, I can. I was in court a year ago on this date.”
“Court?” Travis asked as she raised her eyebrows.
“Getting divorced. I reckon you can get all kinds of documentation about that.”
“I don’t think I need it,” she said with another shake of her head. “But it’s nice to know it exists if I do.” She looked at her notebook, but I wasn’t convinced she was actually checking anything. I think it was just a habit, or to make me think she was looking at something. “Tell me more about the Kramers. Have you gotten to know them during the cruise?”
“Well, sure, a little,” I said with a shrug. “Louise more so than her husband.”
“He seems a little loud.”
I didn’t know what she was trying to get me to say. Maybe she knew about the cell phone incident the day before, early in the cruise, or the confrontation in the dining room. So I said, “Mr. Kramer’s got a lot on his mind, especially right now, I imagine.”
“Do you know of any connection between them and Ben Webster? Did you see either of them talking to him yesterday?”
I was able to answer that with an honest, “No, I sure didn’t. As far as I know, they weren’t acquainted with Mr. Webster at all.”
“As far as you know.”
“That’s all I can tell you,” I said. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“No, of course not,” Travis agreed. “What about Mark Lansing?”
That quick change of subject was an interrogation technique. I knew that from TV—and from being mixed up in a murder investigation the year before. I didn’t let it throw me. I said, “You probably already know that Mr. Lansing and I have spent some time together since yesterday. I’d say we’re friends, even though we haven’t known each other very long.”
“Do you know him well enough to be aware that he’s a private detective?”
If she was trying to surprise something out of me, it didn’t work this time, either. I nodded and said, “Yes, I did.” I didn’t go into detail about how I’d found out that fact. I wasn’t surprised that Travis knew about Mark’s real job. She had probably run the names of everyone on the boat through the computer, and it would have spit out the fact that Mark was a licensed private detective.
Like a bulldog, Travis didn’t let go. “Did he tell you, or did you find out some other way?”
I didn’t want to get tangled up in lies, so I figured it would be best to continue telling the truth. “He didn’t tell me. Someone else did.”
“And who was that?”
I hesitated. “Isn’t there some sort of right to confidentiality between private eyes and their clients?”
“A private investigator working for an attorney is sometimes protected by attorney-client privilege.” Travis smiled and shook her head. “But I’m afraid there’s not any sort of travel agent–client privilege.”
She had me boxed in. I sighed and said, “Mark was hired by Louise Kramer. She told me about it. She thinks that someone who worked on the riverboat last year was responsible for Hannah’s murder, and that whomever it was might still be working here. She’s known Mark since they were both kids. She thought maybe he could find out something.”
“Something that the police haven’t been able to find, you mean.”
I shrugged. “The case is still open.”
“Which means that a private detective shouldn’t be involved with it.”
“That’s between him and the police.”
“Did Mrs. Kramer tell you if he’d found out anything yet?”
“No, she didn’t.” I was getting tired of this.
Maybe Detective Travis sensed that, because she said, “I think that’s all for now, Ms. Dickinson. Thank you for your cooperation.”
I just nodded. I wasn’t going to say that it wasn’t a problem, or anything like that, because it was. I would answer her questions, but I didn’t have to like it.
As I stood up, I asked, “We’re all still confined to the boat?”
“For the time being,” Travis answered without looking up.
I left the salon. I didn’t know whom she was going to question next, but that was her business, not mine. I headed up to the third deck, instead. The chain that closed off the deck along the crew quarters was down at the moment, so I didn’t have to unhook it. I was able to march right down the deck to Mark’s cabin and knock on the door.
Lo and behold, he was actually there this time. He looked surprised to see me when he opened the door. But he smiled like he was glad I was there.
“Hi, Delilah. I was hoping you’d stop by. Have you heard anything about whether or not we’ll be able to get off the boat anytime soon?”
“The detective in charge of the case is bein’ hard-nosed about keeping us on board while she questions everybody,” I told him.
“That’s going to take a while,” he said with a frown. “Between the passengers and the crew, there are quite a few people on this boat.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “Even if you eliminate the passengers, that’s still a lot of murder suspects.”
Mark’s frown deepened. “Why would you eliminate the passengers? I’m not sure anybody who works on the Southern Belle would have had a reason to kill Ben Webster.”
I still had my suspicions about Logan Rafferty, not to mention the fella Webster had accused of cheating in the casino. But I didn’t bring that up now. Instead, I said, “I’m not talkin’ about Ben Webster. I’m talkin’ about whoever killed Hannah Kramer.”
CHAPTER 17
I had finally succeeded in taking him completely by surprise. His jaw practically dropped. He was too much in control of his emotions to let his reaction go quite that far, though. It didn’t last long, either. A second after the words wer
e out of my mouth, his face was once again carefully expressionless.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
I put a hand in the middle of his chest and pushed him backward into his room. Of course, he was a lot bigger than me and I probably couldn’t have budged him if he hadn’t let me, but he didn’t put up a fight. He probably wanted to find out just how much I actually knew.
“Forget it,” I told him as I closed the door behind me. “Louise Kramer told me the whole thing. I know about her daughter and about the two of you bein’ old friends. I even know that you’re a private eye.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “Let me tell you, that’s better than what I was thinkin’ when Louise tried to sneak into your cabin last night and then I saw her comin’ out of here earlier and you hugged her like the two of you had just climbed out of the sack.”
“Delilah!”
“Oh, don’t act so shocked. Aren’t all private eyes sophisticated men of the world?”
Mark shook his head. “You’ve got it all wrong. There’s nothing going on between Louise and me.”
“Didn’t I just say that? I know that y’all are just friends. And that she’s your client.”
“You say that she came here last night? You saw her and talked to her then? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“No, I didn’t talk to her. Until this morning, I didn’t know who the woman was who let herself into your cabin with a key and called your name in the wee hours of the mornin’. What the heck was I supposed to think?”
He looked confused. After a second he said, “If I had a girlfriend coming to my cabin last night, would I have offered the place to you like I did?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Maybe you had some serious foolin’ around in mind.”
He held up his hands, palms out, and said, “Delilah, I swear—”
“Oh, relax,” I told him. “I know now what’s goin’ on, remember? Louise explained the whole thing to me. I’m not mad at you for havin’ a girlfriend.” I snorted. Unladylike, I know, but that was the only way to express what I was feeling just then. “Anyway, even if you had a girlfriend, it wouldn’t be any of my business, now would it?”
He didn’t answer that. Instead he asked, “What did Louise tell you?”
I laid it all out for him, just like she had with me in the dining room. Somehow while we were talking, we wound up sitting down, me in the room’s only chair, Mark on the edge of the bed. When I was finished telling him what Louise had told me, I said, “What about it? Have you found out anything about Hannah Kramer’s murder?”
The question made him look uncomfortable. “That’s really between me and my client, isn’t it?”
“It would be if Detective Travis wasn’t trying to find some connection between Hannah’s murder and what happened to Ben Webster yesterday.”
“But there’s not any connection,” Mark said. He rubbed his jaw in thought. “I’ve looked into the time that Hannah lived in St. Louis, after she left Kennett. She didn’t know anybody named Webster there.”
“You’ve found out the names of everybody she knew?”
“Well, no, I suppose not. That would be pretty difficult. People have lots of acquaintances who don’t play any major part in their lives.”
“Louise said that Hannah got involved with a man in St. Louis. Do you know his name?”
Mark frowned. “I haven’t been able to find out who he was yet. She didn’t really confide in her neighbors in the apartment house or anything like that.”
“So you don’t know. She might have been dating Ben Webster. She could have dumped him, and he could have come on the riverboat to either win her back…or kill her.”
Except for the fact that Ben Webster wasn’t really his name, I reminded myself. The dead man’s true identity was still a mystery. So even if Mark had been able to find out who Hannah’s boyfriend was, he probably wouldn’t have been going by Ben Webster.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Mark said. “Webster’s dead, too. If he killed Hannah—and I think that’s really unlikely—then who killed him?”
Eddie Kramer, maybe, I thought. But if Mark didn’t know whether or not Webster had been Hannah’s boyfriend, then how in the heck could Eddie have found out?
My head was starting to hurt from trying to keep up with all this.
I had something to trade, I told myself. I might not know who the latest murder victim really was, but I knew who he wasn’t. Maybe that was tied in with the case Mark was working on. Maybe it wasn’t. But the best way to start finding out was for both of us to lay our cards on the table.
“Why don’t you tell me everything you’ve been able to find out about Hannah?” I suggested. “And I’ll tell you what I know about Ben Webster.”
“Webster’s got nothing to do with this.”
“How do you know that?”
He thought about that for a second, then slowly nodded. “All right. You’ve got a point there. But you probably know most of this already.”
“Tell me anyway,” I said, realizing that I was starting to sound like Detective Travis. Maybe if the literary tour business went bust, I could start a new career as a cop.
That was a laugh.
“Louise told you that her mom and my mom are best friends, I imagine.”
I nodded. “She did.”
“If you ever lived in a small town, you know how strong the grapevine is. Everybody keeps up with everybody else’s business, even when somebody moves away. So Louise knew that I was a detective.”
“Not a lawyer,” I said with an accusatory tone in my voice.
Mark spread his hands and gave me a rueful smile. “I know, I lied to you. I’m sorry. I’m working undercover, though. You can’t expect me to just blurt out who I really am and what I’m doing to everybody I meet…even really good-looking redheads.”
“Flattery’s not necessary. Don’t think that means I don’t appreciate it, but it’s not necessary.”
“I actually do a lot of work for various law firms, so while I may not be a lawyer, I work for them most of the time. I don’t take on many cases for individual clients like Louise. I wouldn’t have taken this one if she hadn’t been an old friend.”
“Why not?”
“A murder that’s a year old?” He shook his head. “That’s a pretty cold case. Plus, when you start digging around in people’s lives, you never know what you’re going to find out. I might have uncovered something about Hannah that Louise would have rather not known. I still might.”
“Like who her boyfriend in St. Louis was?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “Or who the father of her child was, if it’s not the same guy.”
I couldn’t help but stare at him. “Child?” I repeated.
“Yeah. Hannah Kramer was pregnant when she died.”
That was a shocker, although in this day and age, when it seems like more unmarried women are pregnant than the ones with wedding rings on their fingers, I don’t know why it should have been.
“Did her folks know about that?”
“Sure. The autopsy turned up the fact that she was three months pregnant, and of course the police questioned Louise and Eddie about it. They wanted to know who the father was, since he’d automatically be a suspect in the murder, at least until it was established whether or not he had an alibi. But Louise and Eddie didn’t know anything about it, except that Hannah had been seeing somebody. And Louise was the only one who actually knew that. Hannah and her father didn’t talk much after the big blowup they had that resulted in her moving away from home.”
“Nobody who knew Hannah in St. Louis had any idea?”
“Evidently she kept pretty much to herself,” Mark said. “She was a shy girl. Not really the sort to work as a cocktail waitress in a riverboat casino, although she was pretty enough to do so. Nobody here on board the Southern Belle had any complaints about her work, other than the fact that she was sick fairly often.”
&n
bsp; “Morning sickness,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s my guess.”
Hannah’s pregnancy added another whole layer to the mystery of her death. Not only was the identity of the baby’s father unknown, but so was whether or not the pregnancy had any connection to her death.
A picture was starting to form in my mind. It was fuzzy, but still a picture. If Ben Webster had been Hannah’s boyfriend, if he was the father of her baby, he could have come on board the riverboat now in an attempt to track down her killer and avenge her death. While it was unlikely he would be able to solve her murder in less than a day when the police had been unsuccessful for a whole year, that possibility couldn’t be ruled out. Maybe Webster figured out who the killer was, confronted him, and then whoever it was had committed a second murder to keep from being exposed. As far as I could see, the theory hung together—but it was just a theory, with lots of blank spaces in it where information still needed to be filled in.
I looked at Mark and wondered if the same idea had occurred to him. I had to ask myself if I trusted him enough to share it with him. He had come clean with me, but only when I had already found out most of what was going on myself and he’d been forced to.
He didn’t know about Webster not being Webster, either. I had promised him I’d be honest with him if he was honest with me, so I didn’t see any way out of telling him what I knew.
Before I did, though, there were still a couple of things I wanted to know from him. “What have you been doing since I saw Louise come out of your cabin earlier? I looked around the boat for you but couldn’t find you.”
“I was down below decks talking to some of the engine room crew. They wouldn’t have had that much to do with Hannah while she was working on the boat, but I’m running out of people to ask about her.”
“Don’t they wonder why the guy who plays Mark Twain is asking so many questions?”
“Please,” Mark said. “I don’t just come right out and say, ‘Remember that girl who was murdered last year? Who do you think might have killed her?’ Give me credit for a little more subtlety than that.”
“Did you find out anything?”
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