[Lady Justice 11] - Lady Justice and the Cruise Ship Murders

by Robert Thornhill

  The train track cut through the beautiful Alaskan wilderness, and the tour guide announced exotic places like Resurrection River and Moose Pass as we chugged along.

  We even got to see the Spencer Glacier with its wall of ice high on the mountain above the tracks.

  I had loaded up on black coffee in the Lido, and since then, the opportunity for potty breaks had been limited.

  About an hour into our train ride, the old bladder was sending urgent messages.

  One thing that I had noticed about both of the trains was that they jerked and jiggled --- a lot. There was actually no time, except when the train was at a full stop, when I wasn’t either holding onto something or letting my body pitch with the movement of the train --- kind of like on a trotting horse.

  I excused myself and headed to the lavatory. It was occupied, so I waited, and soon the door swung open and an old gentleman my age stepped out.

  “Good luck!” he said as he passed.

  When I stepped inside, I noticed right away that his luck had not been so good.

  I realized that I was about to accomplish the trifecta of travel urination. I had pee’d on the wall of an airplane that had hit an air pocket while I was in midstream, a ship that had been rolling in stormy seas, and now I was about to initiate the Alaskan Railroad lavatory.

  I unzipped, hung on with one hand and aimed with the other, but it just didn’t matter. One healthy jerk and my precise calculations were thrown completely out of whack. I had a feeling of dismay mixed with pride as I watched the yellow droplets slide down the wall.

  As I zipped up, the thought occurred to me that someone should invent a toilet stabilizer. Maybe I would work on that in my spare time.

  When I stepped out, a blue-haired matron was waiting for her turn. I averted my eyes hoping that she wouldn’t recognize me later on.

  As the door closed, I heard her mutter, “Good Lord!”

  Louis French’s seat was located two cars ahead of the Stewarts and their cop friends.

  He was in the car between his and theirs after making the first of his preparations.

  He met one of the conductors coming down the aisle and handed him an envelope and a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I wonder if you’d do me a favor?”

  The man took the twenty and nodded.

  “I’d like you to deliver this note to a Mr. Stewart in car #2417.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  When the conductor had left the car, French moved to his own car and stepped into the lavatory where he slipped on a wig and fastened a moustache above his lip.

  Smiling, he took his seat. All hell was about to break loose.

  I had returned to my seat and had just picked up a complementary map of downtown Anchorage, when the blue-haired matron came down the aisle.

  When she came along side my seat she paused and gave me a glare that would have peeled paint. She didn’t say a word, but her, “Harrumph!” conveyed her message very well.

  “What was that all about?” Maggie asked.

  “Possibly a case of misdirection,” I replied, hoping she would drop the subject.

  Maggie was about to continue her interrogation when a conductor entered the car.

  “Is there a Mr. Stewart aboard?”

  Hesitantly, Mark raised his hand.

  “A gentleman in the next car asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Mark the note.

  I didn’t even wait to see the contents of the note.

  I grabbed the conductor’s arm. “Take me to the man that gave you this --- NOW!”

  The startled conductor said, “Sure, follow me.”

  We went to the car where he had received the note and he looked around. “He’s not here.”

  “Then let’s try the next car.”

  After looking through the car, he said apologetically, “Sorry, I just don’t see the guy.”

  I returned and found a very distraught Mark Stewart.

  He handed me the note. “He’s here!”

  The note read:

  Mr. Stewart,

  We have arrived at a point where you must decide how much that gold is worth to you.

  I have placed a bomb somewhere aboard the train. I will detonate it at exactly ten-thirty if you do not do exactly as I ask, resulting in the deaths of many innocent people as well as you, your wife and your friends.

  You will take the suitcase with the gold, place it in the lavatory of the car in front of you and return to your seat.

  After you have deposited the gold, remain in your car.

  If, at any time before we reach Anchorage, I see you or any of your friends out of your car, I will detonate the bomb.

  I hope that your friends will not attempt something foolish. The gold is simply not worth the staggering loss of life that would result.

  L. French

  “The s.o.b. even had the gall to sign it!” I exclaimed.

  I looked at my watch. “Holy crap! It’s ten-fifteen!”

  “We’ve been talking while you were away,” Ox said. “If French wants Mark to put the gold in the next car, then the bomb has to either be in our car or the one behind us, and we’re betting on our car. If the six of us spread out, maybe we can find the thing.”

  “Five of us,” I said. “If we can’t find it in time, Mark has to put the gold in the lavatory. We can’t risk the lives of the sixty people in this car.”

  “Agreed!” everyone said.

  “Then let’s get to it!”

  Mark grabbed the suitcase with the gold and stood by the car door while the rest of us looked under and around every seat, causing quite a disturbance among the other passengers.

  Naturally, I was the one that drew the seat of the blue-haired lady. “You again! Harrrumph!”

  The poor lady didn’t realize that in ten minutes none of us might ever pee again.

  By the time we had worked our way to the front of the car, it was ten-twenty-five.

  “Only one more place to look,” Ox said and stepped out on the platform separating the two cars.

  There was nothing in plain sight, so we got down on our hands and knees and looked under the metal platform.

  “Bingo!” Ox said, as we looked at the brick of C-4 and the detonator attached to the underneath side.

  There was a red wire and a blue wire running from the detonator to the C-4.

  “Which one shall I pull?” Ox asked as he reached his long arm under the platform.

  “How the hell should I know?” I said. “I’m not a bomb expert. We need Judy.”

  “No time!” he replied. “Now pick one!”

  I looked at my watch and if it was right, we had about thirty seconds.

  “PICK ONE!” Ox ordered again.

  “RED!” I shouted in desperation.

  Ox immediately reached for the blue wire and gave it a jerk.

  I closed my eyes and waited for the explosion --- but it didn’t come.

  “I --- I --- I said ‘red’.”

  “I know,” Ox said. “You haven’t let me down yet.”

  In that one moment, three years of calling the wrong coin flip had paid big dividends.

  Mentally and emotionally exhausted, we took our seats among the passengers that had no clue that they had nearly been blown to smithereens.

  At ten-thirty, Mark Stewart had not deposited the gold in the lavatory.

  “What a shame!” French thought. “Now all of those people will have to die.”

  He actually didn’t care one way or the other. When the bomb exploded, the train would come to a halt and he would be the first one on the scene to snag the bag of gold from the rubble and no one would be the wiser.

  He punched the button on the remote detonator and waited for the concussion of the explosion, but it never came.

  He clenched his fists in anger.

  “They’ve escaped again!” he muttered through clenched teeth. “But not next time! I have one more chance at that gold and I will NOT fail!”

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 17

  Day #7-Anchorage

  We had notified the conductor that there was a disabled C-4 bomb attached to the train, and someone had obviously called ahead, because when we pulled into the depot in Anchorage, a bevy of law enforcement types flooded the train.

  Naturally, we had a lot of explaining to do and after an hour of intense interrogation, they finally let us go.

  Thankfully, the testimony of the conductor and the contents of the note with the bomb threat shifted suspicion away from us.

  The mysterious man, that we knew to be Louis French, was never found.

  We were transported from the depot to the Westmark Hotel located in the heart of downtown anchorage. At fourteen stories, the hotel, owned coincidently by the Holland-America Cruise Line, was one of the tallest buildings in Anchorage.

  We checked in, received our room keys and found our luggage waiting in our rooms just as promised.

  By this time, it was almost one in the afternoon and we were starved, so we found a quaint little restaurant overlooking the harbor and enjoyed a lunch of fish and chips.

  Downtown Anchorage was a carbon copy of the other Alaskan cities we had visited --- only larger.

  Every street surrounding the hotel was filled with jewelry stores, restaurants, bars and novelty shops brimming with tourist knick-knacks inscribed with ‘Alaska’, in case the weary traveler had forgotten to buy a souvenir for some relative or friend.

  We had decided to just roam the streets and soak up our last bit of Alaska.

  Poor Mark was reluctant to leave his gold in the hotel room given the fact that Louis French had devised a tool that would get him into most any room with a key card, so he dutifully dragged the wheeled carry-on up and down the streets and in and out of the stores.

  We had been up since four that morning, so by six in the evening, we were all pooped.

  We found another cutesy restaurant for supper and then decided to call it a day.

  Our plane was to leave Anchorage at seven-ten the next morning, which meant that we had to be at the airport by five. In order to do that, we had to catch the bus from the hotel at four-thirty, which meant another morning of hauling our butts out of bed in the middle of the night.

  As on the ship, we had to have our bags outside of our hotel room before we went to bed. Someone, in the wee hours of the morning, would take our bags to the appropriate bus.

  I was dog-tired when my head hit the pillow. Vacations are fun, but the past two days had been grueling. If we could just get on the plane without further incident, we would be on our way home and in our own beds by the next evening, and I was certainly ready for that.

  The alarm buzzed at the ungodly hour of three-thirty.

  I staggered to the bathroom with one eye open and the other still glued shut. I can’t say for sure, but I might have added to my résumé by christening the wall of the Westmark. Maggie was so out of it that she didn’t yelp, so I had no way of knowing one-way or the other.

  We met our friends by the elevator at four-fifteen.

  We were about to climb on, when Mark’s cell phone rang.

  “Who could possibly be calling at this hour?” he wondered.

  When I saw the look on his face, I knew immediately who it was.

  He punched the hands-free key and we all listened.

  “Mr. Stewart, this is Louis French. We’ve never had the pleasure of meeting personally, but I think you know we have something in common --- the desire to possess that gold.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What I want, is for you to drop the carry-on with the gold into the trash receptacle, located behind your bus, just before your bus pulls away. Then you will board your bus and be on your way.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Your friends were most fortunate on the train to have located my little surprise and even more lucky to have disarmed it. You will not be so fortunate this time. If that gold is not in the trash receptacle when the bus pulls away, you will not make it out of the parking lot --- I promise you that!”

  “How do I know that you’ll keep your word?”

  “Please, Mr. Stewart. I’m not an animal. All I want is the gold. Once it is mine, I have no further use for you. Do we have an understanding?”

  “We do,” Mark replied.

  “Wonderful!” he replied, and hung up.

  We just looked at one another in dismay.

  “Oh, Lord, not again,” Ox moaned. “What’s the plan?”

  “We need to get down there and take a look at the situation,” I replied. “Then we can decide.”

  When we entered the staging room, a young woman greeted us and checked our names off of a list.

  “You are all on bus #102,” she stated. “Your bags are already there.”

  We exited the building and located our bus. Sure enough, our bags, along with the luggage of all the other passengers, was stacked on the sidewalk beside the bus. The trashcan was just where French said that it would be.

  “The bomb could be in anyone of those bags,” Maggie said. I noted the desperation in her voice.

  “Then we’d better get busy,” Judy said.

  “Won’t French be watching us?” Mark asked.

  “Probably,” Judy replied, but what choice do we have?”

  At that moment, a huge van packed with more luggage for another bus pulled up on the sidewalk blocking the view from the hotel to where our luggage was stacked.

  We all saw it at the same time.

  “NOW!” Ox shouted.

  We rushed behind the van and began unzipping all of the suitcases. At that moment, I was thankful that the TSA had outlawed padlocked luggage.

  The big van was almost unloaded when Ox shouted, “I’ve got it!”

  We all looked at what he had found.

  “Oh, crap!” Judy said, when she had seen the bomb.

  “What?”

  “This one isn’t wired for a remote detonation --- it has a timer!”

  Suddenly the meaning of that sunk in.

  “So this thing is going to go off whether Mark leaves the gold or not! One way, he gets the gold and we’re dead, and the other way he doesn’t get the gold and we’re dead and he gets his revenge. We’re dead either way!”

  “Seems that way,” Judy said.

  “Can we disarm it?”

  Judy looked again. “Four wires this time, red, blue, green and white.”

  Ox shook his head, “With Walt’s track record, I was willing to do a 50-50, but I’m not real crazy about one in four odds.”

  “How much time?” I asked.

  “Twenty minutes,”

  “I have an idea. This thing is going to go off somewhere and we can’t stop it, so let’s make sure it goes off where we want it to go off. Mark, where’s the carry-on with the gold?”

  He handed it to me and I exchanged the gold with the bomb.

  The big van was about to pull away.

  “As soon as the van moves, put the carry-on in the trash receptacle and the rest of us will board the bus.”

  The bus pulled out and the Mark did as he had been instructed.

  Once the bag had been deposited, he looked around and held his arm up in the air with his middle finger extended.

  I hoped that French took that gesture as a sign of defeat and not defiance.

  When we were seated, I looked at my watch. In ten minutes, that trashcan would be blown to bits.

  We felt the bus move as the driver loaded the last of the luggage and finally we heard the door slam shut.

  He climbed aboard and started his little welcome speech. I just hoped that he wouldn’t be too long winded.

  When we had all been dutifully informed about the safety rules, he took his seat and fired up the big diesel.

  We were the last bus to pull away from the curb.

  We all breathed a collective sigh of relief when we were at the edge of the parking lot. The bus came to a halt as the driver waited for traffic to clear. />
  We looked back and saw a lone figure emerge from the shadows and make its way to the trash receptacle.

  The figure reached inside and pulled the bag out.

  Suddenly, the dark, early morning sky was illuminated and we felt the bus rock from the concussion of the explosion.

  Greed and the lust for gold had claimed the life of yet another man.

  EPILOGUE

  Twenty-two hours later, after two plane changes and long layovers in airport waiting rooms, we were finally in Ox’s van, heading home down I-29 with my dad at the wheel.

  He had launched into his improbable story of how he and his Social Security posse had gotten the best of would-be killer, Benny Bondell, before the van’s wheels had even pulled away from the terminal curb.

  Naturally, he went into vivid detail of how he had used Anne, the CPR doll, to lure the unsuspecting Bondell into the trap and save Mary Murphy’s hide.

  After we had all been duly impressed with his craftiness and cunning, he mentioned the fact that I would need to work something out between the Police Department and the senior center to replace Anne’s head that had been blown away in the fracas.

  Something to look forward to on my first day back on the job.

  As I sat there listening to his rambling narrative, I thought about how we could trump his story with our own tales of hanging off the side of a mountain, being thrown off of a moving train, nearly stabbed to death in our nausea-induced slumber and barely escaping being blown to bits on two separate occasions, but I kept my mouth shut. No need to spoil his moment of glory. There would be plenty of time later to amuse our friends and family with our near-death experiences.

  When Ox and Judy had invited us to accompany them on their honeymoon cruise, we all had visions of a peaceful journey on the high seas, indulging ourselves in fine cuisine and marveling at the splendor of our northernmost state, far removed the murder and mayhem that was part of our professional lives back home.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, but when it was all said and done, our adventure together was certainly one that none of us would ever forget, and our friends could boast that their honeymoon was one-of-a-kind. More importantly, it strengthened that special bond that exists when you trust another person with your life.