Death Takes Passage #4

by Sue Henry

  “I don’t remember why I thought he looked different from the others. There was something, I guess, but I don’t remember. Sorry. Maybe I will. I’ll think about it. Okay?”

  Alex smiled at her. “Yes, it’s more than okay, Lou. You’ve been a big help. If you think of it, tell me or Jessie. Right?”

  “Right. Bye.” She sprang to her feet and waved as she walked off toward her own stateroom, two doors away from the Berrys’, putting on her headphones as she went.

  “I told you she was sharp,” Jessie told Alex. “I like her … a lot.”

  “Yeah, me too. I just hope somehow we can catch this thief before he—she—gets rid of, or returns, that clip and the watch. We’ll have nothing to rate a trial or conviction if we don’t.”

  18

  3:00 P.M.

  Tuesday, July 15, 1997

  Spirit of ‘98

  Endicott Arm, Inside Passage, Alaska

  “You KNOW, ALEX, I’VE BEEN THINKING.”

  Jensen lay on his bed in their stateroom, hands behind his head, long legs stretched out, relaxing for the moment and trying to make some sense out of the tangled web of the events of the last two days. He had decided that while passengers were circling the decks to walk off their lunch, watching the passing landscape as the Spirit left Endicott Arm on its way to Frederick Sound for a possible look at whales, no one would risk being seen entering the Berry or Lovegren stateroom: there was the chance that either couple might, at any moment, return for one reason or another, as most passengers went in and out of their rooms throughout the day. If the money clip was to be returned, it would more likely be during a time when the passengers were gathered for a meal, or later in the evening, when entertainment would draw them to the lounge. Any watching should be done then.

  Jessie interrupted his thoughts.

  “Are you just wool-gathering, or are you considering something specific?” he teased.

  When she didn’t respond in kind, with a tossed pillow or some other equally retaliatory action, but instead sat down on her bed, frowning thoughtfully, he concluded she was serious.

  “Didn’t Judy Raymond say that Violet Raymond Stander adopted her mother?” she asked.

  “Yeah, she did,” he answered slowly. “Why?”

  “Well, that seems impossible to me. Isn’t she too young to have had a mother adopted by someone who was in Dawson a hundred years ago during the gold rush? Jeff Smith is the great-grandson of Soapy Smith, not his grandson. Right? For the sake of discussion, let’s say that Violet was maybe twenty in 1898. That means she would be forty in 1918. Somewhere between is when most women would most likely adopt a child. Even if she was in her forties when she adopted a child, it would make that child, Judy’s mother, in her seventies now, if she had been a newborn or very small child at the time she was adopted. If Judy’s mother, in turn, had a child at, say, thirty, in 1948, that child would be almost fifty now. If she had one at forty, in 1958, it would still be almost forty. Does she look almost forty or fifty to you?”

  Alex sat up and stared at her, following her thought process.

  “Damn. That one slipped right by me. Too many things happening at once. She’s nowhere near either, of course. Thirty, at the most, but more like middle twenties. Maybe that’s what she was trying to hide with her hostile attitude.”

  “Maybe. But what it really means is that she’s a generation off in her estimate—it’s out of whack.”

  “You’re right. Well, she told me one lie, why wouldn’t she tell another? Where did she get the gold chain? She presumably wasn’t given it by her mother, who had it from Violet, was she? Stole it from someone? Who?”

  “I’d really doubt it. But why would she lie? Seems like it would have been easy to count on her fingers, though, I’ll admit I had to sit down and think about it for a while. Did she steal it somewhere? Does it belong to someone else? Could she be playing some game? It could be any number of things.”

  Alex shook his head in bafflement. “She’s using Raymond, which, I think, was Violet’s maiden name before she married Antone Stander, one of the gold rush kings, who died broke after giving her all his money. This gets more complex by the hour. I’m beginning to lose track of all the details. Could you get that notebook?”

  Jessie got up to retrieve it, along with a pen, from the dressing table.

  “Let me go through everything I can think of, in the order it occurred. Maybe if I can see it all written down I can make some connections—some kind of sense out of it. I wish I had a blackboard. It’s easier to get a big picture when you can see it all spread out, can erase and fill in when you need to. However …

  “Okay, what all has happened? Write just the specific happenings, not speculations about them. Then we’ll go back and go over them one by one. Help me out here, if you think of anything I’ve missed.

  “First, during the party the watch, money clip, and gold chain were stolen from the Berrys, Lovegrens, and Judy Raymond, respectively. I met Julie Morrison in the captain’s office and she refused to let us search her things. You and I talked with the Berrys and Lovegrens, but didn’t find Raymond till later.

  “Then we met Dallas and Rozie, and spent the afternoon with them in Sitka, where you saw someone following you. There was …”

  The loudspeaker broke in, interrupting him:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there are three whales on the starboard side of the ship at approximately three on your imaginary clock.”

  Jessie dropped the notebook, stood up, and grabbed her jacket and camera. “Oh, let’s go see. These are the first ones they’ve spotted.”

  Passengers were crowding to the rails from everywhere on the ship.

  “These are humpbacks, one of many varieties of whales that migrate north in the summer, though most stay farther from land. Humpbacks, northern right whales, and minis whales, all come in among the islands of the passage to feed. Orcas—killer whales—may also be seen, but they are not true whales, being in the same family as dolphins.

  “Humpback whales are medium-sized, averaging forty-six to fifty feet and twenty-five to thirty-five tons in weight. The babies are sixteen feet long at birth and weigh only two tons. The adults are black, with some white on the throat, belly, flippers, and tail. Each whale is unique and can be identified by the difference in coloring and shape of its flukes.

  “These whales usually stay together in groups up to a dozen, and are among the most active whales. You may see them breach—rising out of the water to fall back in—slap the water with their flukes, or spyhop—coming up to look around them with only the head showing. They can stay deep in the water for as long as twenty-eight minutes without coming up for air. In groups of two or three, they sometimes engage in a cooperative effort called bubble-net feeding. One takes a large breath of air at the surface, then dives under a school of herring. Rising in a spiral, while exhaling to release a circle of bubbles, it drives the herring, which are afraid to swim through the net of bubbles, to the surface, where another whale opens its mouth and eats the frantic ball of tiny fish.

  “Humpbacks are still an endangered whale, with a worldwide estimate of perhaps ten thousand. They have been protected since 1966.”

  Jessie was busy with her camera, as the whales rose and sank in the ocean. Several times they breached, failing back to create an enormous splash as they hit the water. Coming slightly closer, one raised its head just enough to take a look at the ship, including the people lining the rails, with a huge eye.

  “Wow,” Alex said. “Wish they’d do that bubble-net thing. That’s something I’d really like to see.”

  They watched until the whales fell behind the ship as it sped up to continue its trip south.

  Back in the stateroom, Jessie picked up the notebook and settled herself on the bed, getting them back into the list by reading the last entry.

  “We went into Sitka with Rozie and Dallas.”

  She stopped writing and looked up at him thoughtfully. “You know, I think I j
ust might have got a picture of that guy who was following us, from a long ways away. It might be worthwhile to have that film developed when we get to Ketchikan tomorrow morning. There must be a place that develops in an hour. If there’s anything at all in the pictures, we could have it enlarged. Maybe they have one of those machines that lets you do enlarging yourself.”

  “Good idea. Do you know which roll of film it is?”

  “Yes. I mark them with tape and number them, so I know which one is which. That one was number four: Sitka.”

  “That’s pretty organized.”

  “Well, I got tired of finding odd rolls of exposed film in the back of the suitcase, or in the bottom of my purse, and having no clue what they were.”

  “Well, get it out and we’ll make sure to get that done.”

  “Okay. What next? We were talking about the afternoon in Sitka.”

  “Right. Next we interviewed John Stanley and Lou in the lounge.”

  “And saw the first part of the Mystery Flay at dinner.”

  “How’s that relate?”

  “It doesn’t, I guess. But a mystery is a mystery, so I threw it in.”

  Jensen grinned and went back to his mental list.

  “Early Tuesday morning Morrison was missing and we searched until McKimmey found where she had gone over the stem outside Soapy’s Parlour. Then we talked to Don Sawyer and found out who she really was. How’s Don taking it all now, by the way?”

  “Finding that other woman was a shock, but he seems to be getting it back together. He’s pretty angry about it all. Still thinks her husband had something to do with her death. I think it helped when they found her body in Peril Strait. He hated the idea of her in the water somewhere.” Jessie shuddered. “So did I.”

  “I’ll talk with him again soon. Don could be right about that husband of hers. Even though the attorney says he’s not our man, he could be wrong. I asked Commander Swift, in Anchorage, to see what he could find out about the guy—see if he’s really been in Phoenix, or if he could have been elsewhere—or sent someone to do his dirty work. If anybody can check it out, Ivan can.

  “Now … we interviewed Judy Raymond, finally, and she was hostile. We talked about the possibility of her attempting some kind of insurance fraud—stealing the other things as a cover-up. I’d like to know where she was when the chain and watch were returned, or at least found. All that you figured out about her age fits in here. Good going, by the way, Jess.”

  “She was in the dining room at lunch. I saw her with that Bill what’s his name, the one from the Red Onion,” she told him, with a smile for the compliment.

  “Prentice. Bill Prentice. She seems to be spending a lot of time with him. Maybe I should see what I can find out about him, too.

  “Then we found that woman’s body in Tracy Arm and took it aboard. I checked on the guards for the gold, and the second one has been beat on by someone.”

  “We found the ax that was used on Julie Morrison,” Jessie interjected.

  “Right. That will go to the lab in Anchorage, along with the body we found. Two bodies—what a confusion.

  “The gold chain reappeared and. … That’s it, I think. Now, does any of it fit together? Come over here, so we can both look at your list.”

  Jessie was sitting against a pillow at the head of her bed, with her legs stretched out, at ease. She leaned back, sighed a comfortable-sounding sigh, and gave Alex an amused look, raising an eyebrow.

  “Okay … okay. I get it,” he replied. He stood up and crossed to join her, bringing his pillow along. “You don’t take dictation, make coffee, or respond well to demands, right?”

  “Right.” She moved over to make room for him to sit next to her.

  “Oh, I forgot, Lou told us about seeing the man going into the Berrys’ stateroom.”

  Jessie added it to the list.

  “Okay. Let’s examine each item and the people who were involved, or affected by it.

  “The watch, money clip, cash, and gold chain. Whoever stole them had to either be on the ship, or come back aboard during the party in Haines. Dallas and Rozetta stayed on board, as did Wayne Johnson, and all of them were on the deck the thefts were committed on. Makes sense, there are more cabins on this deck than the others. We also have all the crew members that were aboard.

  “When Captain Kay asked for my help the next morning, I met Julie Morrison. She refused to let us search her things, but now we know that she was probably protecting her identity and Sawyer’s, as well as the names and location of her mother and son. A letter from her mother was with the identification papers. It didn’t have a return address, but, from what she wrote, it wouldn’t have been too hard to figure out that they were in a large northern city on the West Coast.”

  “Then we met Dallas and Rozie,” Jessie read from her list. “But they aren’t part of this, are they?”

  “No, but Rozie was with you when you noticed someone following, so I think it’s sensible to put down everyone involved in any way, suspicious or not. I’m just trying to see if there are any connections between what’s been happening.”

  “Okay, you’re right, that’s reasonable. We’ll get the film developed and see if I got anything. Probably didn’t, but you never know. It’s worth a try.”

  “I’d sure like to know who was following you.”

  It may have been my imagination, you know. A coincidence.”

  “I doubt it. You’re usually pretty aware of what’s going on around you.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think it was a coincidence either. I find myself looking at all the people on the ship to see if I recognize anyone.”

  “Keep looking, Jess. There’ve got to be a few you haven’t seen, or at least focused on, yet.

  “We talked to John Stanley and Lou in the lounge. Nothing helpful there. But Lou actually may have seen the thief outside the Lovegrens’ stateroom. I wish she remembered what it was that made her think it wasn’t a crew member.”

  “Maybe she will.”

  “Right. Just have to wait and see. I still want to have someone watch the Lovegrens’ stateroom. It’s the easiest, since it’s closer to the rest of the ship. If Judy Raymond should turn out to have something to do with this, she’s right next door, and it would be convenient to slip back into the Lovegrens’.”

  “I was wondering about that stakeout you’re thinking about. You know Don Sawyer didn’t come to lunch … stayed in his stateroom. Isn’t it possible he won’t want to come to dinner either?”

  “Oh, I don’t imagine …”

  “You’re missing the point, Alex. If he stayed in his stateroom once, he could do it again. But this time …”

  “… he could stay in the Lovegrens’ stateroom,” Jensen finished for her. “Good idea, Jess. Only one problem. I haven’t removed the Lovegrens or Berrys from my list of suspects. We don’t know that any of them are cleared for sure.”

  “Oh, you don’t really think one of them did this, do you?”

  “No. I know they were at the Haines party, because I saw them there. The first mate confirmed that no one came back aboard during that time.”

  “Well, if you want to set up a watch, you’ve got to trust somebody, and it might as well be the Lovegrens.”

  “Intuition has been wrong before, Jess. But I think you’re right. Okay, let’s see if they’ll go along. We could even arrange for dinner to be sent to Sawyer’s own room early, while passengers are still around, drifting toward the dining room, so people see it arrive and think he’s there.”

  “Yes. And just in case someone’s keeping an eye on the Lovegrens’ stateroom to see when they’re gone, let’s disguise him going in. Chuck Lovegren wears a green jacket and a cap with a bill. They’re close to the same size. Let Don wear it going in with Carol, and I’ll bet they’d think it was Chuck.”

  “Good. But we’ve got to have Chuck come out so the stateroom appears empty. If Chuck and Carol go in and out several times, together and individually, between now and
dinner, Chuck could eventually stay in. Who would be counting every entrance, without seeming obvious? Carol can bring out the jacket and cap folded inside a coat of her own, and we can slip Don in wearing Chuck’s clothes. Then Chuck can put them back on, come out with her, and we’re set.”

  “But what if somebody really does go in to return the money clip? Are we forgetting that this may be a killer we’re dealing with?”

  “No. I’ll figure out a way to stay close enough to get there if there’s any trouble.”

  “You’re in the play tonight. Did you forget?”

  “Oh, damn. Yes. What time is it? I told Laurie I’d be there at four. Why did I ever agree to do that thing?”

  “Only three-thirty. Don’t panic.”

  “I’ll just have to cancel my part in the play.”

  “Alex! You can’t now, it’s too late for them to get anyone else.”

  “Well, you do it.”

  “How could I? Borrow your mustache?”

  He had to laugh at the thought of Jessie trying to play Arizona Charlie Meadows in his mustache. “Guess not, huh? Okay, I’ll do it. It won’t take very long. It’s just a few lines.”

  “Couldn’t I stay in the Berrys’ stateroom next door and watch?”

  Jensen shook his head and stood thinking for a minute.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not putting you into this. If they go into one stateroom, they’ll likely go into the other as well. Don’s enough. But I’ve got a better idea. If you and Lou were at the stem, and she was sitting just where she was during lunch, she could look around and be hidden by the fire equipment, like she was before. She’s such a tiny little thing.”

  “She’s tough, I think. Fragile looking, but strong. You don’t think they’d notice we weren’t at dinner either.”

  “With a hundred people going to dinner, who’d know which ones to count? And who’s to watch, if they’re going back into those staterooms? No, I don’t think so. Waiting and watching to make sure the Lovegrens’ stateroom is empty makes more sense.”