The Starfire Breeze is no small potatoes. According to company brochures, it carries two thousand passengers and a crew of a thousand. Using my well-worn detective skills, I went first to my grandmother’s last-known address—her stateroom on Bahia Deck. The door to her room was ajar, and an attendant was busily making up the bed. “Breakfast,” he told me when I inquired. “Mrs. Jenssen went to breakfast.”
The ship is fourteen stories tall. It boasts two formal dining rooms—the Crystal and the Regal—as well as a twenty-four-hour buffet up on the Lido Deck. Knowing my grandmother, I tried the buffet first—to no avail. After that, I tried the dining rooms. To the dismay of a full contingent of concerned wait staff, I waved aside all offers of help and went wandering through the white-tableclothed wilderness of the Crystal Dining Room. In a windowed alcove near the back of the ballroom-sized room I came across Marc Alley huddled at a table for two with an early-forties blondish woman armed with a laptop computer as well as a small tape recorder.
He was up and dressed—nattily coat-and-tie-dressed—but he looked more than a little worse for wear. His overused appearance reminded me of some of my nightly debaucheries back in the good old days when I was hell-bent on misspending my own youth. Since Marc was obviously busy with the scheduled interview he had mentioned the night before, I was prepared to walk past without interrupting them. To my surprise, he waved me over to the table.
“How’s it going, Beau?” he said.
“Fine,” I told him. “How about you?”
He gestured toward the woman seated with him. “This is Christine Moran,” he said. “She’s a journalist. This is Beau Beaumont.”
The blonde held out her hand and looked me up and down. “Beau Beaumont,” she said. “Isn’t that a little repetitive?”
As a cop I’ve always had a natural aversion to journalists of any kind. Christine Moran’s greeting did nothing to make me want to change that position. I smiled back at her. “Let’s put it this way,” I said. “Given a choice between Beau Beaumont or Jonas Piedmont Beaumont, which one would you prefer?”
She nodded. “You’re right. Glad to meet you, Beau.”
“Are you with one of the papers?” I asked, thinking of Seattle’s two dailies.
Christine shook her head. “I’m a freelancer,” she said. “Mostly medical stuff for various popular-science and health-type journals. I’m covering the neurology meeting on board. I’m also interviewing Mr. Renaissance Man here as a sidebar to a feature article I’m doing on Dr. Featherman.”
“Renaissance?” I asked.
Marc shrugged. “That’s how I feel,” he explained. “Once I had the brain surgery and my seizures stopped, I felt like I’d been reborn, like Dr. Featherman had taken a terrible monkey off my back and given me back my life. I could have called myself Lazarus, I suppose, but I prefer Renaissance.”
I caught sight of the outer edge of a hickey peeking out from under the collar of Marc’s starched and pressed white shirt. If Harrison Featherman had dealt with one part of Marc’s being reborn, Dr. Featherman’s ex-wife had evidently made her own contribution to his sense of well-being, if not necessarily his health.
I took another look around the dining room to ascertain that Beverly Jenssen wasn’t to be found among the other diners. “If you’re trying to do an interview, I’d better let you get on with it.”
“Wait,” Marc said. “Do you have plans for later on today?”
“It’s an at-sea day,” I told him. “Barring a helicopter ride, I don’t suppose I’m going anywhere.”
“I’d like to talk to you for a little while,” he said. “I need your advice on something. What time would be convenient? I’m busy with the conference all morning. How about one o’clock?”
I couldn’t imagine what kind of counsel Marc Alley would want from me. If it was some kind of advice to the lovelorn, I knew I was out of my league. “Sure,” I said. “Where should we meet?”
I would have liked to suggest my stateroom, but I had no idea whether or not I’d still be dealing with Lars. “How about right here?” Marc returned. “We can have lunch.”
“Right,” I said. “That’ll be fine.”
Nodding to Christine Moran, I skedaddled out of the Crystal and took the atrium’s glass elevator two floors up to Regal. And that’s where I found Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, delicately slicing her way through a thick piece of syrup-drenched French toast.
“Well,” she sniffed as I took a seat at the table. “I suppose Lars came crying on your shoulder, and now he’s sent you here to try talking some sense into me, right?”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
“But he didn’t offer any kind of an apology, did he?”
“No, but—”
“No buts,” Beverly interrupted. “If he wants to talk to me, he’d better come on his own two feet, and he’d better be carrying his hat in his hand.”
“It’s just that he didn’t like you gambling, Grandma,” I said. “For some reason, it really upset him.”
“I noticed that without having to be told,” she replied.
“Don’t you think you could tone it down a little?”
“Jonas,” she said. Beverly Jenssen was already sitting bolt upright in her chair, but when she said my name, she seemed to gain in stature—the way an angry cat can seemingly double in size by standing its fur on end. “I was gambling with my own money,” she said. “And what I choose to do with my money is my business.”
“Lars just hates to see you throwing your money away.”
“Who’s throwing it away? At last count, I was up two hundred and eighty-six dollars, so I don’t see what he’s complaining about. But the money’s beside the point. In fact, it has nothing to do with money, nothing at all.”
“It doesn’t?” I asked.
“No. Lars wants to be able to tell me what to do, and that’s not going to happen. It turns out I don’t even like slot machines all that much, but as soon as he told me we were leaving, I decided I would sit on that stool the rest of the night—until hell froze over, if necessary.”
“Look, Grandma,” I argued. “This is your honeymoon. What would it hurt to just go along with things?”
“It would hurt a lot,” she retorted. “That kind of bossiness has to be nipped in the bud. If Lars had said he was tired and asked me couldn’t we please go back to the room, I would have gone along in a minute without a complaint. But he told me we were going. There’s a big difference.”
Beverly Jenssen finished polishing off her French toast and pushed her plate away. An alert buser swooped over to collect it. “Will you be having breakfast, sir?” he asked, with a coffeepot poised over the clean cup in front of me.
“No, thanks,” I told him. “I’m just visiting.”
“Very good, sir,” he replied, and disappeared with Beverly’s plate in one hand and the coffeepot in the other.
“You were at our wedding, weren’t you, Jonas?” she asked.
“Yes, of course I was.”
“And do you remember my saying anything about love, honor, and obey?”
“Well, no.”
“Right,” she said. “That’s because I had the judge leave out the ‘obey’ part. We said love, honor, and cherish. Not obey. You see,” she added, “obey was in my first wedding ceremony. I’m a person who keeps my word. Since I made the promise, I kept it. But keeping that vow to your grandfather, Jonas, cost me far more than I ever would have thought possible. I lost my daughter over it, and I almost lost you, too. I’m not going to live that way again.”
Beverly set her cup back in the saucer with enough force that coffee slopped out over the top. She used her napkin to brush away a mist of tears that suddenly veiled her eyes. That’s when I understood that this lover’s quarrel really had nothing to do with slot machines and everything to do with my grandfather—Jonas Piedmont, my biological grandfather.
My mother was pregnant with me when her boyfriend, my father, was killed in a moto
rcycle accident on his way back to his naval base in Bremerton. Jonas Piedmont had disowned his pregnant teenaged daughter. All those years she struggled to raise me on her own, he had never so much as lifted a finger to help her. Not only had he turned his own back on my mother, he had forced his wife, my grandmother, to do the same. It was long after my mother’s death from cancer and only when my grandfather had been crippled by a stroke and was at death’s door himself that I had reestablished contact with them.
No, as far as Beverly Piedmont Jenssen was concerned, there were far bigger issues at stake than an evening spent plying the handle of a one-armed bandit.
“Lars is in my room sleeping,” I said. “I think he spent most of the night sitting outside in a deck chair.”
“Silly old fool,” Beverly murmured. “He’ll probably catch his death of cold.”
“Don’t you want to go talk to him?”
Beverly sniffed and dabbed at her nose with a lacy handkerchief she had fumbled out of her pocket. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m just not ready to talk to him yet. I don’t know what I’d say. In fact, I think I’ll go back to the cabin and lie down for a while myself. The truth of the matter is, I didn’t sleep very well last night, either.”
“Come on, then,” I said, helping her up and offering my arm. “I’ll walk you to your door.”
Her hand on my arm was almost bird-boned, and she leaned against me as we walked. The gale had yet to blow itself out, and I was happy to be there to steady her as we made our way down the long, narrow corridor to their cabin on the Bahia Deck.
“I’m glad to see you’re wearing your bracelets,” she said when we stopped in front of her door and while I waited for her to extract the room key card from her pocket.
“They saved my life,” I told her. “In this kind of rough sea, if I weren’t wearing them, I’d probably be flat on my back in bed.”
I held the door open for her and walked her as far as the freshly made-up bed. “You’re sure you don’t need anything?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m fine. I’ll just take a little nap. And if I do need something, the attendant is right outside.”
“All right, then,” I said, backing toward the door. “Sleep well.”
“Jonas?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell Lars what I said?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t think so. If he’s as smart as I think he is, he’ll figure it out on his own. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.”
“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.”
I went out and closed the door. As I walked back up the corridor carpeted with a distinctive strewn-seashell design, I was struck by a fit of despair. Lars and Beverly were both pushing ninety, for God’s sake, and the two of them still couldn’t make heads or tails of the battle of the sexes. If with a combined total of over seventy years of experience with marriage they couldn’t make it work, then there sure as hell wasn’t much hope for the rest of us.
4
AFTER DEPOSITING BEVERLY in her cabin, I returned to mine. Lars was still asleep, only now he was sprawled crosswise on my rumpled bed. Because of that, I didn’t hang around. Instead, I went down and tried walking around on the Promenade Deck. When that proved to be far too wet and blustery, I went up to the Lido Deck’s buffet and drowned my sorrows in a couple of cups of coffee.
It turns out I did have some sorrows to drown. I’ve never been one for great feats of introspection, but now, retired from Seattle PD, I found that self-examination had caught up with me anyway. I’d be fine as long as I was preoccupied with whatever was going on around me, but as soon as I was left to my own devices, waking or sleeping, a single image invaded my being.
In my mind’s eye I would once again see Sue Danielson, wounded and bleeding, lying propped against the living-room wall in the shattered ruins of her apartment. She would be clutching her weapon and waving me down the hallway toward where her ex-husband was hiding. And then, moments later, I would once again be standing in the bare-bones waiting room at Harborview Hospital. The doctor, still in surgical scrubs, would come through the swinging door. He would catch my eye over the heads of Sue’s two bewildered young sons and give me the sign—that slight but telling shake of his head—that said it was over. Sue Danielson hadn’t made it.
No matter how many times I relive those wrenching scenes, they don’t get any better. I’ve been to the departmental shrink. Dr. Katherine Majors tells me that I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress. She claims that’s why I keep having flashbacks. Not the kind of flashbacks that makes broken-down vets think they’re back in ‘Nam and under attack by the Vietcong, but close enough. Close enough to keep me from sleeping much at night. Close enough to make me wonder if I’m losing my grip. Close enough to make me postpone accepting the attorney general’s offer to go to work on her Special Homicide Investigation Team based down in Olympia.
It’s not as if this kind of stuff hasn’t happened to me before. I was there years ago when Ron Peters was hurt and later on when Big Al Lindstrom got shot, but those incidents didn’t affect me quite the same way. Ron may be confined to a wheelchair now, but he’s reclaimed his life. He has his daughters, Heather and Tracy, and a new wife. And now Ron Peters is the proud father of a recently arrived son who also happens to be my namesake.
As a result of his injuries, Big Al Lindstrom was forced to take early retirement, but as far as I can tell, he and his wife, Molly, are both enjoying the hell out of it. The AG’s office made Big Al the same offer they gave me, and he didn’t even think twice about saying thanks, but no thanks. Molly probably would have killed him if he had tried to go back to work.
With Sue Danielson, though, it’s different. She’s dead. Her sons are orphans, and no amount of psychobabble from Dr. Majors is going to change that. No amount of talking it over and “getting it out of my system” will alter the fact that Sue won’t be there to see her boys graduate from high school or college. She’ll never be the mother of the groom at a wedding or have the chance to cradle a newborn grandchild in her arms. I continue to blame myself for all those things—to feel that, justifiably or not, there must have been something else I could have done that would have fixed the situation and made things turn out differently.
And, Lars and Beverly’s honeymoon aside, that was the other reason I was on the Starfire Breeze—because I hadn’t yet figured out what to do with myself or how to forget.
“Is this seat taken?”
I looked up to find the beaming face of Naomi Pepper, my seatmate from dinner the night before, smiling down at me. She was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate piled high with fresh fruit and melon in the other.
“No,” I said. “Help yourself.”
“You’re the only familiar face I saw,” she continued. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, really. It’s fine.”
Naomi settled down across from me. “Everyone else seems to be sleeping in.” She grinned. “I’m the only early bird.”
“Does that make me the worm?” I asked.
Her smile disappeared. “Are you always this surly?” she returned.
Her question took me aback. I had been making a joke that didn’t strike me as particularly surly. “What do you mean?”
“How about, ‘My wives are dead. Both of them’?” Naomi continued mockingly. “For somebody who’s supposed to be a fortune hunter, you don’t have much of a knack for it. That’s not what I’d call getting off on the right foot. In fact, you made it sound as though you personally were responsible for knocking them both off, which isn’t a very high recommendation when you’re shopping around for wife number three.”
With Anne Corley, the term “knocking her off” was far closer to the painful truth than I wanted to come, although the exonerating words of the official determination had labeled her death “justifiable homicide.” Rather than say so, however, I went on the offensive.
&nb
sp; “Fortune hunter!” I exclaimed indignantly “Whatever gave you the idea that I’m a fortune hunter?”
“Isn’t that what dance hosts do?” she asked. “They prowl through cruise-ship passenger lists looking for wealthy widows or divorcées. Which I’m not, by the way,” she added, slicing into a piece of watermelon and forking some of it into her mouth. “Far from it.”
I may have sounded surly before, but now I was truly offended. “Look, once and for all, I am not a dance host—never have been. I don’t know where you women get that idea.”
“Oh,” she said. “You’re such a good dancer. That’s why, when we girls talked it over later, we all assumed you were one.”
“Thank you,” I muttered, feeling somewhat mollified by the compliment. “About the dancing, I mean. My mother’s the one who insisted I take lessons,” I added.
Naomi smiled brightly. “You certainly got her money’s worth.”
We sat in silence for a while during which Naomi worked her way through several pieces of melon. As she did so, I noticed for the first time that Naomi Pepper was wearing a wedding band.
“Will you be joining us for dinner tonight?” she asked a few minutes later. “Or did we scare you off? I’ve heard tell that as a group we can be a pretty intimidating foursome.”
“I’m tough,” I said. “I think I can handle it.”
She smiled back at me, and it seemed that the earlier unpleasantness had been entirely forgotten. “For years, Harrison Featherman was the only male in the bunch who could put up with all of us as a group, but then even he bailed. Now we’re back to the way we started some thirty-five years ago when we were all college roommates over at Wazoo. Now it’s just the four of us.”
In the state of Washington, natives speaking shorthand refer to the University of Washington in Seattle as the U Dub and to its cross-state rival in Pullman, Washington State University, as Wazoo. As a former Husky, I couldn’t help falling into the old collegiate rivalry. Unlike a few other things I could name, it doesn’t seem to diminish with time.
Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) Page 4
