Death on the Mississippi

by Forrest, Richard;

Everyone in the room froze in a silent tableau as the blinding light outside the window cascaded through the room in one gigantic flash.

  “Mother of God,” Sam said. “That was New York City.”

  “We have New York City a hundred twenty miles away to the south and Boston the same distance to the north,” Lyon said. “And we’re only twenty miles from New London, where the Electric Boat Company, the sub base, and the Coast Guard Academy are located.”

  “I don’t think I need a geography lesson, Wentworth,” Bea said huskily.

  “We’re history,” Sam said.

  “I love you, Lyon,” Bea said as she wound her arms around him.

  4

  A bright light flashed again and then again.

  “Perfect. Absolutely perfect,” Dalton Turman said from the doorway. “It has exceeded my fondest dreams.” The flash on his Polaroid camera winked again.

  Sam Idelweise blinked. “What?”

  “As I would have expected,” Dalton said. “The Wentworths are locked in a final embrace while Idelweise is standing there looking dumb. Harold, I do believe you have wet your pants.” The flash blinked again. “Now, there’s an interesting reaction.” He turned the camera toward a corner of the room. The girl’s brimmed painter hat had fallen to the floor and her long hair, released from its bondage, fell down her back. She was locked in the embrace of a young male painter. His hands tore at her blouse, while her fingers under his shirt clawed at his back as she pressed against him. “Smile for the birdy, Bambi, honey,” Dalton said as he snapped another picture and laughed. “Now you can go ahead and finish.”

  Sam reached into a large toolbox to pick up a hammer. “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch!” He started toward Dalton, who turned and ran from the room.

  “Stop them, Lyon!” Bea said in alarm.

  When Lyon reached the outside of the building, Dalton was halfway down the path leading to the water. Sam was not far behind and seemed to be gaining. The construction foreman bellowed and waved the hammer over his head.

  Dalton reached the water steps ahead of Sam, and without breaking stride, ran into the bay and dove. He swam twenty strong strokes before turning to tred water.

  Sam stood waist-deep in the water with the hammer still raised. Lyon reached for the weapon. “Easy, Sam.” Idelweise snatched the hammer away with a glare.

  “I knew the bear couldn’t swim,” Dalton called. “Uhoh.” He quickly ducked underwater as the hammer arced through the air and landed where his head had been.

  “I swear to God, I’m going to get that sucker,” Sam said before he stomped from the water and back toward the main building.

  Dalton surfaced and waved at Lyon. “Get my camera, will you? And have Bobby take the boat out a hundred yards with everyone aboard except Sam. I’ll meet you guys out there.”

  “That man should be quarantined on an uninhabited island,” Bea said as she climbed aboard the houseboat.

  “Do you know where Bobby is?” Lyon asked as he followed his wife aboard.

  “They told me he was on board. Let’s look in his stateroom.”

  They walked through the main saloon and back toward the rooms. The last door was slightly ajar. There was a couple on the bunk.

  Katrina Loops did not have on her string bikini, in fact neither she nor Bobby Douglas wore anything. Lyon and Bea quickly turned and hurried back down the hall but not before they were viewed with alarm by the embracing couple.

  “Wait!” Katrina rushed down the companionway after them, wrapping a large terry-cloth towel around her large frame as she ran. She clutched at Bea’s arm. “Please don’t say anything to anyone. Please.”

  “We didn’t intend to,” Bea answered.

  She turned to Lyon. “He’d kill me if he thought I was doing it with anyone else.” The woman had momentarily lost any vestiges of sophistication, and had reverted to a teenager’s fear of authority.

  “Not a word,” Lyon promised.

  She looked at each of them a moment, clutched the towel tightly around her neck, and then hurried back down the hall.

  “I have questions,” Bea said when they were seated on deck under the awning. “Would Sam have bludgeoned Dalton to death if he had caught him during that wild chase?”

  “The way I read Sam, he would have beaten the hell out of Dalton, but not killed him.”

  “Maybe true over the practical joke,” Bea said. “But in other areas I’m not so sure.”

  “My question,” said Lyon, “is, if Katrina is so concerned about Dalton finding out she’s having an affair with Bobby, why in the hell do they do it in the middle of the day on Dalton’s boat with the door open?”

  “I think she wanted Pan to walk in on them,” Bea said.

  “Ah, that was the game plan.”

  “An ancient method of hiding the real reason for suspicion,” Bea said.

  “What have you heard about Douglas? I don’t believe Dalton’s story about running drugs.”

  “Pandora tells me that he’s a ranked tennis player and will be the pro here at the resort when it opens. He’s crewing this barge only until his leg tendon mends. Let’s see if we can find a drink. I need something to help me recover from World War Three.”

  Dalton changed clothes, but not before closing the drapes in the main saloon and insisting that they all sit Indian fashion on the floor. No one commented on the unorthodox seating, but they all knew that it gave them protection from possible gunfire.

  “Isn’t anyone going to talk to me?” Dalton asked.

  “No one wants to talk to you and Sam wants to kill you,” Pan said. “Bambi was so embarrassed that she ran off the job crying hysterically that the only reason she tried to do it was because she didn’t want to die a virgin.”

  “What!” Dalton yelled. “Bambi was a virgin? Why wasn’t I told? I would have demanded the right of droit du seigneur. Where’s my camera?”

  “I threw it in the water! You jerk!”

  Dalton smiled bitterly. “That wasn’t a very nice thing for Miss Conviviality to do.”

  “Oh, stop it! I was never Miss Conviviality and you know it. The only votes I ever got were from my high-school football team when they selected me as Miss Community Chest, and I’ll leave that one to your imagination.”

  “That was a convincing trick you played on us,” Lyon interjected to relieve tension. “How did you do it?”

  Dalton preened. “One out-of-work actor, a tape recorder, and some radio equipment from Radio Shack. That was the easy part. It took me three nights’ work to get the magnesium placed properly outside the ballroom. Synchronizing its explosion with a trigger device was a little complicated, but worth it. If you could only have seen your faces … You really shouldn’t have destroyed my camera, Pan. That’s a no-no.”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “At least my friends appreciate me,” Dalton said as he smiled at Bea.

  Pan went rigid. Her fists clenched as she stood angrily before her husband. “Your friends! You don’t have any friends. The Wentworths are practically the only people left on this planet who will give you the time of day. And they only see you once a year and during that time you succeed in doing perfectly dreadful things to them.”

  “It will only cost a couple of hundred dollars to repair the holes in the kitchen wall that Rocco made,” Bea said.

  “And even Lyon would probably hit you if he wasn’t so grateful over that business during the war,” Pan continued.

  “What war was that?” Katrina asked.

  “The War is always the one the men present fought in,” Bea said.

  “That time-sharing business doesn’t sound so bad,” Lyon said in a valiant attempt to change the direction of the conversation. “Katrina gave us the full sales pitch, and the ability to swap units for a week anywhere in the world does sound intriguing.”

  Dalton harumphed. “Sure, if you care for Timbuktu in the dead of winter, or if high summer in Death Valley grabs you.”

  “No one
can be that cynical,” Katrina said with a laugh.

  “It has nothing to do with cynicism,” the developer said. “I call it reality orientation, survival of the fittest, or as the bumper sticker on my Mercedes says, ‘He who has the most toys at the end wins.’”

  As Bobby Douglas gently docked the Mississippi on the river across from Nutmeg Hill, they saw a heavyset man in a business suit standing impatiently on the lip of the ancient pier. He had taken off his suit jacket and had it hooked over his shoulder with his finger as a foot tapped the planking. His whole body seemed to will a faster progress of the houseboat’s mooring.

  “Why do I have this strong feeling that Mr. Dice wishes to have words with me?” Dalton asked.

  “Because I can tell by the way he’s acting that you’ve screwed him again, darling,” Pan answered sweetly.

  “Yonder impatient man is Randy Dice, my partner and chief financial officer,” Dalton said to Lyon. “He has this insane compulsion to make our balance sheets actually balance.”

  “I can’t wait to depart from this craft of joy,” Bea whispered in Lyon’s ear.

  Dice dropped his jacket and jumped to the deck of the houseboat before the lines had been secured. Bobby stood at the bow holding a coiled rope. He shrugged and leaped the short distance to the pier and began to complete the docking alone. Dice hurried toward Dalton.

  “You lied to me again!” His voice cracked with intensity.

  “Probably,” Dalton said with his usual skewered smile. “If it’s about being the father of your children, I have already talked to your wife about that.”

  “I’m in no mood for your frivolous jokes. I went to the bank today.”

  “It seems to me that you often go to the bank. In fact, Randy, you are always going to the bank.”

  “They asked me about the sale of your West Hartford house. A clerk picked up the deed transfer during a routine check of the week’s recordings. That house was one of the items we pledged as loan collateral. I gave my word. I signed disclosure statements and notes to that effect. My word and reputation are on the line, and you sold it out from under us and never deposited the money in our corporate accounts.”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “This is the end, Dalton. I warned you. I am finished. I resign from the corporation effective immediately.”

  “Let us reason together, my boy,” Dalton said as he took the irate businessman’s arm and led him across the deck away from the others. Dice seemed to shrink as he listened to Dalton, and after a short conversation he stepped back on the pier and began to walk slowly up the hill to his parked car. His suit jacket lay on the planking where he had discarded it.

  “Is he leaving the company?” Pan asked as Dalton rejoined them.

  “I think not. I believe I have persuaded Mr. Dice that it is in his best interests to remain a member of our cozy organization.”

  “Okay people,” Pan said exuberantly, “let’s go ashore.”

  “And where in the hell do you think you’re going? We live on this thing now,” Dalton said.

  “Not me, sweety,” Pan said. “Miss Conviviality will not sleep here tonight, and maybe not even tomorrow night.”

  They were a subdued trio as they drove back down the river to the bridge. Lyon was at the wheel with Bea at his side, while a very quiet Pan sat in the rear seat. Bea had tried to make conversation, but the lack of response had quickly stifled the attempt. Bobby and Katrina had driven off in the resort’s station wagon claiming a host of errands. They had left Dalton standing on the upper deck with a drink in his hand, staring sullenly down at them.

  “You’re welcome to stay the night at Nutmeg Hill,” Bea said in her second attempt at dialogue.

  “I don’t want to be a bother,” Pan replied. “I have a cottage at the resort where I can stay. I think I’d rather be alone tonight to do some serious thinking.”

  “I understand,” Bea answered. “Borrow our car.”

  “Wake up, Wentworth!”

  He winked open one eye to see Bea bent over him bathed in bright moonlight. She poked him in the ribs. “What is?” he managed to mumble.

  “Someone is downstairs pounding on the front door.”

  “Equal rights say you go.” He pulled the pillow over his head.

  “I would, except that it’s probably your large policeman friend here to discuss some interesting case.”

  “Okay.” He stumbled from bed and toward the door. “What time is it?”

  “It’s three A.M., and in case it isn’t Rocco down there, you had better put something on.”

  “Oh, ya.” He realized he was nude and reached into the closet to snick a robe from its hook. He slipped it on and belted it. “You know, I think Katrina looked better in the string bikini than she did au naturel.”

  “At this stage of life you should know that all of us look slightly ludicrous in that position. Go answer the door.”

  Pandora Turman was leaning against the house near the front door as she mechanically raised and lowered the large brass doorknocker.

  “You didn’t have to return our car this early,” Lyon said before he realized the inanity of the remark.

  “He’s gone. I went back to where the boat was docked and Dalton is gone.”

  “He probably went into town.”

  “You don’t understand, Lyon. The Mississippi is gone. The whole houseboat has disappeared.”

  5

  They stood in moonlight on the patio and took turns looking through the telescope. They swept the river in both directions until their vision was obscured by its change in course.

  “I can’t see it,” Bea said, “and it would be hard to miss something that large.”

  Pan paced nervously behind them. “I went to our cottage back at the resort, but I couldn’t get to sleep worrying about how much financial pressure Dalton’s been under lately. I decided to go back to him and drove back down here. When I couldn’t find the boat, I just thought he’d moved it for some reason. I drove up the river to Hartford, and back all the way to the Sound. I can’t find it. He’s gone.”

  “Let me check it out with Rocco,” Lyon said. “He’s our local police chief.” He went into the kitchen and dialed the wall phone. The call was answered on the first ring. “I have a problem,” he said without preamble.

  “When you call at three in the morning and I’m still awake, we both have problems.”

  “Dalton Turman is missing.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “I’m serious. The guy and his boat are gone. His wife is here and she’s worried sick. She doesn’t deserve that, Rocco.”

  “Her marriage proves that she’s paying for terrible sins from past lives. She must have been Typhoid Mary.”

  “I’m calling you as a friend who happens to be a police officer.”

  “Did it ever occur to you why I’m awake? I will tell you why. I am trying to create a DD twenty-three–forty-one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An official form called, ‘Unauthorized Discharge of a Firearm.’ Copies go to the Mayor, the State Police, and the state. You’re the writer, tell me how to explain why I was at a party, drinking pepper vodka, and then chose to empty a Magnum at a dish cabinet filled with large snakes. You don’t happen to have any snake remains around, do you?”

  “We sent them to the dump, but we still have the bullet holes in the wall.”

  “That won’t help. All right, how long has Dalton been gone?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “I can’t start an official investigation for at least twenty-four hours, and you know his tricks never last that long.”

  “He’s had threats, and today someone took a shot at us.”

  “I haven’t seen any official reports of a shot, and as far as threats are concerned, not only is Dalton Prankenstein, he is also a builder. In his case, threats should be expected. If you think the bad guys are after him, you’re really a glutton for punishment.”

 
“The houseboat seems to be gone.”

  “It’s either on the river or on the Sound. If we’re really lucky, he’s in Spain by now.”

  “I repeat,” Lyon said, “someone shot at us on the boat today with a high-powered rifle.”

  “You thought someone fired at you. That’s easy enough to stage. You know, this guy is going to keep chewing you up until you stop playing his games.” Rocco paused, waiting for Lyon’s agreement. When it wasn’t forthcoming, he continued. “Okay, if you’re going to spend the rest of the night looking for the Mississippi, you might try the bridges. That barge is as big as a damn destroyer and can’t go upstream or out into the Sound without making it past a bridge. Do you know the ones I mean?”

  “Yes, there’s one upstream from us at Haddam’s Neck, and another at the mouth of the river.”

  “Right, and either one would have to be opened for the Mississippi. They’re manned twenty-four hours a day, and the operator keeps a log on each opening. Go talk to bridges while I try and invent a good story about snakes.”

  Lyon had prepared a hot Thermos before they left the house, and they drank coffee as they drove toward the Haddam’s Neck bridge. Pandora cupped a plastic mug with both hands and spoke in a quiet voice that was far removed from her earlier staccato speech.

  “Something terrible has happened to him or he has decided to leave me.”

  “Or he’s going to let us spend all day looking before he appears with a drink in his hand and that damn laugh of his.”

  “Either that rotten man who calls at night has gotten him or he’s run off with his new girlfriend.” She glanced at Lyon with a feline ferocity. “A woman can always tell when her man is doing it with someone else. If I ever catch them together, I’ll kill him and tear her face off.”

  “There are other alternatives, Pan,” Lyon said. “You had a minor argument and in a fit of pique he hid the boat in a cove. If he didn’t pass through either of the bridges, we’ll know he slipped into a dock area near here.”

  “Will these help?” She handed him a packet of photographs. “Dalton took these to send to some boat magazine.”

  Lyon glanced down at the spread of color photographs taken of the houseboat from a score of different distances, heights, and angles. “They’ll be a big help.” He reached over to squeeze her fingers, but her hands were tightly clutching the dashboard.