The Branson Beauty

by Claire Booth

  “You sure you didn’t leave the pilothouse?”

  “Why the hell is that important? No. I didn’t. What, did Mandy get hurt or something? She didn’t get hurt during the crash, did she?”

  Go for broke, Hank thought. He made sure Albert was looking directly at him.

  “Mandy was murdered in the private dining room. She was strangled to death. Did you kill her?”

  Albert’s throat made a kind of rattling sound as he sucked in all of the surrounding air. He opened and closed his mouth several times before he spoke.

  “Who would do that? Do you know who did it? My God. Mandy.”

  Hank watched him carefully. He just couldn’t get a handle on this guy. He looked to be telling the gospel truth. But he could so easily be saying everything he thought Hank wanted to hear. Everything to give himself an alibi—for the boat, and for Mandy.

  “How are her friends taking it? All the other girls on the track team?” Albert rattled on. “Her boyfriend—didn’t she have a boyfriend? And Tony? I always suspected he had a little bit of a crush on those track girls. And her parents? Oh, Lord, her poor parents…”

  Hank stopped him there. A bit of a crush? On all of them? Well, Albert said, not really. There was his sister, of course. Tony’d always acted as though that was why he was there—to pick up Alyssa or some such thing. He’d arrive early and sit and watch, trying not to let on that he was focused on Mandy. He’d never said anything to Tony, Albert went on, because—well, heck, he had been a teenager once, too, and weren’t we all supposed to have impossible crushes at that age? Tony had never said anything to him about Mandy, and he hadn’t been around nearly as much this past fall for the cross-country season. Of course, Mandy was off at college then.

  Tony had been a pretty good employee. He’d worked on the boat for about two years. Very conscientious, obedient. But anytime he had a spare minute, he’d pull out his phone and start fiddling with it.

  “Wait … I thought there was no cell service along stretches of the Beauty’s route?” Hank said.

  “Oh, there’s not. He could download stuff to the phone, like a TV show or something, at home and then play it back on the boat. He was showing Roy and me how to do it. Had one of those Hangover movies on there. I don’t know how he could see anything—it was all way too small for me to focus on.”

  Hank leaned forward. “Tell me about Roy. He said you two were friends.”

  “We are, I guess. I’m not, you know, a real friendly guy. But Roy sure is persistent. He just wore me out with all his talking. So eventually, I had to start talking back, you know? He’d been in ’Nam, too, so that made it easier. Not that we talked about that much, just a couple of times. Told him things I hadn’t talked about in years … decades, really. But mostly we just shot the shit. And boy, is Roy full of it.” Albert shook his head. “Very dramatic. Always full of plans about how he is going to break out, become a ‘true star.’ He has this idea for a huge stage show on the Strip. It would be patriotic and salute the veterans and have magic acts for the kids and be full of country music and maybe a little bit of Shakespeare or somebody like that. And he would be the star—the one who takes the audience on its ‘transforming journey.’ He repeats that description a lot. I just nod and listen. Listening’s a lot easier than talking, you know.”

  Actually, Hank had found that for most people, the opposite was true.

  “He’ll talk and talk,” Albert continued. “That’s all he’s ever been able to do. He’s gotten turned down by just about everybody in town. Poor guy. And he says he won’t go to New York and try out there because they don’t have the proper respect for veterans. I think it’s because big cities scare him. Don’t blame him on that score. Damn frightening, those places.”

  Hank was about to reply when a doctor walked in and immediately told him to get out. Unless his patient was under arrest, the law had no business being there for a physical exam. He sighed and was halfway to the door when Albert spoke again.

  “You know, I wasn’t really a believer before. But I’ve been living down here for a while now, and I’ve done a bit of thinking. You kind of have to, surrounded by these hills. So I run, and I paint, and it’s quiet. Makes you think there might be a God out there. And my boat, too, on the lake. You wouldn’t think that would be a blessing—such a silly thing as the quiet—but it is. Quiet, like you’re being granted a bit of peace you don’t quite deserve. I know I don’t. I did things over there. I followed orders like a good soldier. I did it to stay alive, and I’ve wished I were dead ever since. So I know what you’re thinking, and I know it makes sense to you in your investigation, but there is no way that I would ever cause anyone harm ever again. And I would never … never have hurt Mandy Bryson.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  The house was completely dark. Hank drove by twice, but there was no sign that the Brysons were up again at this late hour. He turned the car around and started down the winding road out of the development, back to his own house. He drove slowly, cautious of the probable black ice that had formed on the insides of the curves. He rounded one and his headlights bounced off a ghost.

  All white, it staggered along the edge of the road like an exhausted marathon runner. He was so tired he was starting to see things.

  He shook his head, but the apparition continued along with its half jog-half stumble. He carefully pulled up alongside and realized the white was a nightgown and it was occupied by an almost-as-pale Gina Bryson. Jesus. He slammed the car into park and leapt out, calling her name. She turned to look and stumbled. Hank barely reached her in time to keep her from falling into the snow.

  “What are you doing? Good God, are you all right?”

  She clutched his arms to keep herself upright as her knees started to buckle. She had no coat, no gloves, no hat. Just the nightgown. And running shoes.

  “Mrs. Bryson,” he said very quietly, “I’m going to take you home now.”

  She shook her head frantically. “No, no. I’m going for a run. A run. It will help. It will help. It will make me feel free. I’ve never run, but that’s what she always said. ‘It makes me feel free.’ I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s so simple, really. Just go for a run. So I need to finish my run.”

  She sank lower as her knees gave out. Hank scooped her up and carried her to the car. She weighed next to nothing and shook as if the cold originated deep inside her bones rather than from the outside air. “No. Please. I have to finish my run. Please…”

  * * *

  Hank arrived at the office the next morning to find that Gallagher had canceled his rescheduled appointment.

  “Why do you look like that makes you happy?” Sheila asked him.

  “Because now I get to be impolite,” he said. “Let’s get a warrant for his business records. But first, you want to come with me? I’m going to haul that Cummings guy in for questioning.”

  Sheila chortled. “Your timing might end up being perfect. The reason that damn lawyer gave me when he called to cancel was that Gallagher had to ‘work through the weekend’ on very pressing business matters. I heard a couple other voices in the background. Might be Cummings. It’d be damn fun to take him in front of his boss.”

  “You are a cop after my own heart,” Hank said.

  They took a squad car over to the glittering new offices of Gallagher Enterprises, a big building of rock and glass off Roark Valley Road that had to have been designed by the same nouveau-Ozark firm that had done Gallagher’s mansion. Surprisingly for a Saturday morning, the front door was unlocked. Hank bet that was an oversight that wouldn’t be repeated. They walked right in and up to the second floor, where the back of the building overlooked an undeveloped swath of trees. They could hear movement inside the main office.

  Sheila strode forward and moved to plow through the half-open door. Hank stopped her and held his finger to his lips. He slowly swung the door open and stood there, arms folded across his chest, and waited to be noticed.
In front of him was a very large desk and, behind it, an enormous window that took up the entire wall. No one sat at the desk. The noise was coming from a corner of the office, where the Company Man was hunched over a shredder, pulling tangles of paper out of its nether regions. He gave one last fierce yank, stood up with a fist full of strips, and froze when he saw Hank. He let out a squeak as Hank sauntered into the room.

  He walked to the wall perpendicular to the window. It was covered with several poster boards that depicted what he assumed were various Gallagher Enterprises proposed projects. One looked like an addition to the resort outside of town. Another seemed to have something to do with the mostly vacant outlet mall east of the Strip. There were a few more smaller boards, and then a blank spot on the wall. Hank perused them all.

  “Wow,” he said. “Gallagher Enterprises is in full expansion mode. Where’re you getting the money for all of these?”

  “What are you … you doing here?” the Company Man said. The hand holding the paper strips trembled slightly. “You … you can’t be here. You don’t have permission … you’re trespassing.”

  “What’re you going to do,” Sheila said smoothly, “call the police?” Hank was frankly surprised she’d managed to stay quiet for as long as she had.

  He finally turned away from the wall and toward the Company Man, who still stood by the shredder. Behind him sat a large trash can overflowing with paper strips. A broken piece of poster board stuck up like a sail from the top of the pile. He walked forward until he was a foot away from Cummings, who finally moved just in time to reach up and stop his glasses from slipping off his nose. The dude was starting to sweat heavily, even though the office was not well heated, what with the system probably being on a weekend timer.

  “So tell me,” Hank said. “What is so urgent that you need to be working so hard on a Saturday morning? What are you shredding?”

  “Oh, just junk. Old forms and such.”

  “Anything regarding the Beauty?”

  Cummings stared down at his fistful of strips.

  “I suggest you tell me,” Hank said, crossing his arms again. “We’re about to get a warrant for this whole place as it is.”

  Cummings sighed. “Yes, some Beauty records. Just confidential employment documents. Since those people are no longer employed with us, I’m just correctly disposing of their records.”

  “So it’s only been four days, and you’ve already decided you’re not giving these people jobs somewhere else in the company?”

  “There are … there are no open positions right now,” he said.

  “How much payroll will you get rid of?”

  That took Cummings just a second. “Only two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars a year. See, we’re not saving that much.”

  Hank thought about Anna Fenton and her stump, and Mrs. Pugo and her bursitis, and all the other now-elderly leftovers from Crazy Otis’s day. “And what about the health insurance? What were their premiums costing you? You’re self-insured, right? You gotta cover all those bills yourselves.”

  Cummings pushed his glasses back up his nose again. Then he stared at his feet. Then the ceiling.

  “You know the numbers for everything,” Hank said. “Don’t stand there and act like you don’t. I’m getting warrants, remember? How much?”

  The glasses again. “Two point three million last year.”

  Sheila let out a low whistle. “And that would only go up as those folks got older,” she said.

  Cummings’s grip on the strips tightened, and he tried to glance nonchalantly out the window behind the desk. The trembling and sweating didn’t do much to help him achieve that. Hank bet his next look would be to the clock hanging above all of those planning poster boards. He was right. It was 8:02, and the Company Man was expecting someone. Someone who was now late. He and Sheila both heard the downstairs front door open at the same time. She smoothly moved to the side of the office door and up against the wall. Hank took one step back from Cummings so the little guy would have a clear view of his boss coming into the room. He had been so busy trying to casually get a glimpse of the parking lot through the big window that he hadn’t heard the outer door. That meant another squeak was coming.

  “What on earth?” Gallagher stopped in the doorway. “What are you doing here, Terry?”

  Squeak.

  “I don’t … Oh, my. Worth. Goodness. What are you doing here?” Gallagher stared at Hank. Hank stared back, silently. “Really,” Gallagher said, “I don’t believe this. Terry, what are you doing with those papers? Why are you shredding them?”

  The color drained from Cummings’s face. He started to speak, but then closed his mouth, slowly, as if he’d decided there was nothing worth saying. His fist dropped to his side.

  “Terry, did you and Mr. Gallagher have an appointment to meet here at this time?” Hank asked.

  Cummings didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t blink. Gallagher snorted.

  “No, we did not. I came to get some paperwork I left by mistake. No one is supposed to be here. I really don’t know … Terry, what have you done? Is this about the boat? What did you do to my boat?”

  Terry stayed silent.

  “What do you know about the boat?” Hank asked, turning toward Gallagher. The question gave him the pinched-nose look Hank had seen often on the day of the Beauty’s grounding.

  “I know that it was my most prized business. That I entrusted it to an incompetent captain. That it is now a total loss—for everyone in town,” Gallagher said.

  “For everyone except you,” Hank said. “You get twenty million out of it. Everyone else just gets to apply for unemployment.”

  Gallagher stiffened. “I am getting tired of you slandering me, Worth. I know nothing about any plan to sabotage the Beauty.”

  Cummings took a hesitant step and managed to bump the overflowing trash can. Strips of paper tumbled out, and the broken poster board crashed down flat on the floor. Hank swooped down, snatched it off the carpet, and turned it right side up. It was the left half of the layout for a theater, with circular rows of seats radiating outward and stage parts labeled with terms he didn’t know. The heading that remained read: The Branson Sta— And in smaller print below it: Coming to the Stri—

  He raised an eyebrow. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing,” Cummings said.

  “Then why do you look even more worried than you did two seconds ago?” Hank asked.

  Cummings shrugged.

  “You’re coming down to the station with us—voluntarily, of course,” Hank said. “You’re not under arrest.” Hank did not want Cummings clamming up and demanding a lawyer. “But some interesting issues have been raised here, and we need to talk about them some more.”

  Sheila escorted the Company Man out of the room. Hank, still holding the broken poster board, turned to Gallagher.

  “How’d you get him to burn down the boat?” he asked.

  Gallagher looked at him calmly. “I didn’t get him to burn down the boat. I didn’t get him to do anything. I can’t believe he has done this to my company. I’m heartbroken.”

  Hank’s eyebrows climbed in disbelief.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “It’s still your show. You’re running it. You’re running everything. You ordered that boat sunk.”

  “Well,” Gallagher said, smoothing the front of his wool coat, “I look forward to you trying to prove that, Worth. But you won’t be able to. Because I didn’t order anything done, and I will swear to that in a court of law. I’m just a local businessman, trying to do my best for the community.”

  He reached out and plucked the poster board out of Hank’s hand. “I believe you have a suspect to interrogate, so I’ll bid you good day.”

  * * *

  Hank let Sheila drive over to the main station in Forsyth. He stared out the passenger window at the snow-spackled trees lining the roadway. He had just heard an awful lot of non-swearing for a situation that called for a lot of it. Everything h
ad sounded rehearsed. From Gallagher, anyway. Cummings’s reaction had most definitely not been. The guy had been completely blindsided. Hank’s plan had been to turn the Company Man against his boss, but now he wasn’t so sure that would work. Even right there, in the moment, Cummings had kept his mouth shut.

  But why would Gallagher have chosen to hang Cummings out to dry now? He had been blaming the grounding on Albert, and the burning on accidental ignition. And it was working—with the fire marshal and with the insurance company. Why switch tactics now? By setting up Cummings to take the fall, he was almost certainly sacrificing the twenty million dollars. No insurance company would pay out if a high-ranking employee was convicted of purposefully destroying the boat.

  The sun bounced off the melting snow on the side of the road. Hank closed his eyes against the blinding glare. Only one thing would be serious enough for Gallagher to throw away that kind of money. Murder. Felony murder. A killing committed during the course of a different felony—say, insurance fraud—could make the defrauders guilty of homicide, too, even if they weren’t on the boat at the time. And a man with a fancy Ladue lawyer would certainly have had that explained to him.

  But what would link Gallagher to the murder? Thanks to that idiot Fizzel, it was public knowledge that Mandy had a stalker. And a stalker would have been after just Mandy, not the boat. Gallagher could have easily avoided involvement in that. So what had changed so quickly? Hank’s eyes snapped open. Albert had changed. He’d woken up.

  But nobody knew Albert was awake. Except the people at the hospital. So of course Gallagher knew. He obviously had sources in the hospital. But just knowing that wouldn’t be enough to throw away his currently ironclad strategy. To be really sure that his blame-the-captain strategy wouldn’t work, Gallagher had to know what Albert had said last night. And there was no way— Oh, God. Duane.

  “Stop the car.”

  “What?” Sheila said. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Stop the car. Now.”