by David Dodge
He didn’t try anything, just kept on talking. I finally told him that I was satisfied if he was, and to forget it. I wanted to go to bed. He thought we ought to have a drink together first, to cement the good-neighbor policy. I said any other time, con mucho gusto, but not then, and finally pushed him off.
He went back to the messroom. I climbed the ladder to the boat deck, wondering what it was all about. He wasn’t the type to apologize to a man who had given him a split lip.
Not ten minutes later I was taking off my shoes in my cabin, yawning, when somebody knocked on the door. I opened the door, ready for anything and anybody. It was Harris, the last person I would have expected. He blinked at the light, the way a man does when he has been outside in the dark for some time and his eyes aren’t adjusted to a sudden glare.
“Oh, ah, sorry to knock you up, Colby. May I come in for a minute?”
I let him in. He didn’t sit down, just stood there, still blinking, looking embarrassed.
“None of my business, of course,” he said uncomfortably. “Don’t like to interfere and all that. Supposed I should, really. Been tryin’ to make up my mind.”
“Trying to make up your mind about what?”
“To tell you that someone was in your cabin.”
“When?”
“Few minutes back. Just after we left the poker game. I was standin’ behind one of the lifeboats, gulpin’ fresh air to get the smoke out of my lungs, when I heard a cabin door close. I turned around in time to see somebody pop around the corner here and beetle off to the other side of the ship. Couldn’t say who it was, really, but I doubted that the steward would be messin’ around in your cabin at this time of night. Thought I ought to tell you.”
“Are you sure it was my cabin?”
“Not positive, of course. Didn’t see which door it was. But there are only three cabins on this side; yours, mine, and an empty since that blonde bit of fluff left us at Mollendo. Hardly any reason to steal anything from the empty cabin, and whoever it was wouldn’t have time to reach this corner from my cabin before I turned around. Anyone runnin’ for cover would be rather stupid to dash for the far corner instead of the near one in any event, don’t you think?”
He wasn’t as dumb as he looked, the Englishman. Even if I hadn’t had plenty of reason to suspect that my cabin would be the one of most interest, I would have agreed with his reasoning.
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“Couldn’t say, really. Only caught a glimpse of a moving figure. Thing to do is see if anything is missing and then have the ship searched.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Not at all, old boy. Not at all. Hope you haven’t lost anything valuable.”
He backed out of the cabin, apologizing again for interferin’ and all that, as if he had stepped on my toes instead of doing me a favor.
It didn’t take me long to case the cabin. I wouldn’t have noticed anything ordinarily, but with something to look for, I found it. There was a snap on my shaving kit that took a strong thumb to close. I always closed it. It wasn’t closed now. There were a few other indications, here and there.
I left the cabin and walked forward, past the empty cabin, past Harris’ cabin, and around the corner of the superstructure. Jeff and Raul had the two midship cabins facing forward. The portholes glowed behind their curtains. Lights were still on in the messroom down below, but if the poker game was still going, I couldn’t hear it.
I turned a second corner and went aft on the starboard side. The portholes of the Peruvian couple’s cabin were dark. So were Berrien’s, the middle cabin. So were Ana Luz’s, the last cabin aft, opposite mine on the far side of the radio shack.
I knocked on her door. There was no answer right away. I waited, without knocking again. She finally said, “¿Quién es?”
“Colby.”
“What do you want?”
“To enter.”
The light went on. I heard the hook click—the cabin doors locked from the inside, although not from the outside—and pushed the door open before she had a chance to drop the other hook, the long one you used when you wanted ventilation, into its catch, which would have left me talking through a six-inch crack.
She wore a heavy bathrobe that reached to her ankles. The collar was pulled tightly around her neck. Her hair was down, long over her shoulders. She had taken her makeup off, and her bare feet were in slippers—high-heeled slippers with pompoms on the insteps. They didn’t match the shapeless bathrobe.
She said again, “What do you want?”
I went over to the wardrobe against the far bulkhead and opened it. Hanging with her other clothes was a nightgown, one of the frilly things the customs inspectors had sported with, and a negligee that matched her slippers. I closed the wardrobe.
“The first thing I want is to see what you wear under that robe.”
She turned pale. I was going to be in a bad spot if I had guessed wrong, but I grabbed her with one arm and stripped the bathrobe down from her shoulder while she kicked at me with her pompoms and stabbed for my eyes with two stiff fingers. She missed, luckily. I wondered where she had learned street-fighting.
She was fully dressed under the bathrobe. I let her go.
“You searched my cabin tonight.”
“¡Tontería!” She wasn’t pale now. Her eyes flashed murder.
“You and Berrien are the only persons who know I have it, unless you told somebody else. He wouldn’t tell anyone, and he couldn’t search for it himself even if he wanted to. You had Cornejo delay me below while you were in my cabin.”
“Madness! I had no reason to go to your cabin.”
“Except that you wanted the package. I think you sent a message to Cornejo calling for his help to get it away from me, and decided that you would first search my cabin before you tried to search me.”
“You break into my room in the middle of the night to tell me such nonsense?”
She looked pretty scornful and pretty sure of herself standing there, even with the white dress under her bathrobe to give her away. I said, “Let’s go see Berrien, then, just as you are. Explain to him why you are dressed so, with your hair and feet so, to make it appear that you had been in bed when you did not have time to take off your clothes. Let’s see if he will believe your story.”
“Señor Berrien is asleep. You can make your foolish accusations to him in the morning.”
“We will wake him. I want him to see you as you are.”
“I have given him a sleeping drug. He will not awaken until morning.”
“We will see.”
I took her by the arm.
She went for my eyes with the stiff fingers again, as quick as a cat. Her nails cut the skin below my eyebrows as I dropped my head. She was strong, for her size, and she didn’t fight like the girl who had let Cornejo slap her three times without a comeback. I had all I could do to protect myself from her teeth, head, toes, knees, fingers and elbows before I got a satisfactory grip on both of her elbows from behind and could keep her at arm’s length. Holding her that way, I steered her toward the door.
She let her knees buckle. I had to bring her closer to me to hold her up, and she kicked me in the shins with both heels, so hard that my eyes watered. When I pushed her away, she let her knees sag again.
This time I let her go down, still holding her elbows. I was mad. I didn’t give a damn if Berrien was asleep for a hundred years, I was going to drag that fighting wildcat into his cabin if I had to sew her up in a piece of sailcloth first. I looked around for something to tie her with.
All this time we hadn’t made a sound other than the hisses and grunts knocked out of us by the fight. We were both breathing hard, but not so hard that we missed the tinkle and bang of Berrien’s handbell falling to the deck in the next cabin.
Ana Luz said, “The bell! Por Dios, let me go!”
“I’ll take you there. Just stand up and start walking.”
“
No! No! Let me go! Something has happened! He needs me!”
She began to struggle again. I said, “I thought you told me he was drugged.”
“He was! He is! Something has happened! For the love of God, let me go!”
She wasn’t faking. I let her go.
I was right at her heels when she reached Berrien’s cabin. The portholes were still black, and the door was closed tight. It swung open when she pushed it.
The cabin was completely dark. The porthole covers had been shut, as I found out later, so the only light entering the cabin came through the doorway. And I blocked the doorway as Ana Luz stepped inside.
If the light switch was to the right of the door, where it belonged, I couldn’t find it. I said, “Where are the lights?”
“I’ll get them. Wait.”
Her shadow moved toward me.
At least I thought it was her shadow. I didn’t have time to think much about it, because all of a sudden I got all the lights I could use in a lifetime—pinwheels, skyrockets, flares and four-alarm fire rolled into one beautiful sunburst that started at my chin, exploded behind my eyes, and burned out into a nice restful gray as I went to sleep.
4
I was lying across the sill in the doorway when I woke up. My jaw felt as if it had been blown off, but it was still where it belonged when I reached for it. So was the package taped to my ribs.
The lights were on. Berrien lay on the deck by his bunk. The mattress had been pulled out over the side of the bunk, and the sheets and blankets were in a heap on the bare springs. The rest of the cabin looked the same. Somebody had gone through it like a tornado.
Ana Luz was kneeling at Berrien’s side. She had his hand in hers, and there were tears in her eyes. She didn’t say anything when I got to my feet and closed the door, just knelt there holding his limp hand.
I said, “Dead?”
She nodded.
There weren’t any marks on his body that I could see. His pajamas were unbuttoned, open across his chest. His face was peaceful, which didn’t necessarily mean that he had died peacefully. Dead faces relax, whatever you hear to the contrary about frozen looks of terror.
I said, “Did you see who hit me?”
She shook her head, never moving her eyes from Berrien’s face. Her lips moved silently.
I looked around the cabin. That was when I saw the closed ports. There was a small pile of bills and coins, a watch, and a ring on Berrien’s night table. The hand bell lay on the deck where it had fallen. The box which had held the Inca jewelry on which he had paid export duties in Valparaíso was open, its customs seals broken and its contents dumped out on a chair. I recognized the gold florero and the piece of carved jade. If anything had been taken, other things of value had been passed up.
I said, “What killed him? How did he die?”
“I can not tell. It would not require much—a fright, a blow, anything. Pobrecito, he was always so close to death.”
“You and I could be in trouble, if we are not careful.”
She looked up quickly. She had forgotten everything but Berrien until then. I think she must have loved him, in a way, whatever kind of a double-dealing game she was playing.
I said, “I’m going to call the captain. When he, or anybody else, asks you questions, I knocked on your door a few minutes ago—your light was on because you were reading, or brushing your hair, or whatever you like—and asked you if you had seen or heard anybody go by who might have been a prowler who had searched my cabin. You said no. While we were talking, we heard the bell fall in Berrien’s cabin, and ran to investigate. Tell the rest as it happened. But you never saw me before we came aboard the ship. Neither did Berrien, to your knowledge.”
“Why should I he for you? Why should I not tell the truth—that you broke into my cabin, accused me wildly of searching your things, laid your dirty hands on me…”
“One reason is that if I go to jail for smuggling, I’ll do my best to take you with me, somehow. Another reason is that if the police get me, they get the package. Do you want that to happen?”
She didn’t answer the question. But as I turned toward the door, she said, “Wait.”
She got up off her knees, went into the bathroom, and came back with a twist of cotton and a small bottle of colorless nail polish. I had forgotten the cuts over my eyes, which would spell “roughhouse” to anybody who saw them. They couldn’t be explained away as the result of a smack on the jaw, either. She wiped the blood off, then dabbed nail polish over the cuts to stop the bleeding and hide the marks. She didn’t say she was sorry she had tried to put my eyes out.
The captain was on the bridge, making a last check before he turned in. He swore a green streak when I told him what had happened. He came back to Berrien’s cabin, looked at the body, scratched his head, and called one of the engineers up from below to drill holes in the cabin door and its frame for a padlock. Afterward he had Sparks send a message off to the Callao police.
It was about three o’clock before he got around to me. I told him my story, starting with Harris and the prowler, and then, because his Spanish wasn’t too good, offered to translate for him if he wanted to question the nurse. He told us to save it for the cops, and to get some sleep in the meantime.
I didn’t sleep. I sat in a steamer chair, smoking and thinking, until the sun came over the high ridge of the Andes. An hour later we dropped anchor in Callao harbor. The police came to meet us in a launch.
The man in charge of the investigation was a little mousy fellow who wore shiny military boots and was tired of the whole business before he started. I felt better about my chances of getting off the Talca without trouble as soon as I saw him. He herded all the passengers into the messroom to give their stories, starting with Ana Luz.
She said her name was Ana Luz Benavides and that she was unmarried and a Peruvian citizen. She had worked for about a year as nurse and companion to the dead man. That night, she had read to him until nearly twelve, then given him his usual sleeping medicine. After he went to sleep, she had gone to her own cabin. She was brushing her hair when I knocked to ask about a prowler. We had heard the bell fall in Berrien’s cabin and gone there together. Someone in the cabin had knocked me out and escaped before she turned on the lights. Berrien had been dead when she found him.
Mousy asked me about the prowler. I pushed him off on Harris, who told him just what he had told me. Mousy concluded that my prowler and the man in Berrien’s cabin had been the same person, probably a sneak thief who had knocked the bell over in his hurry, until the captain pointed out that the money and jewelry lying around loose in Berrien’s cabin hadn’t been touched. Mousy wanted to know if Ana Luz had any idea what the thief had been hunting for in Berrien’s cabin.
She looked him in the eye and said she had no idea at all.
The police doctor said that Berrien had died of heartstrain, as far as he could tell without an autopsy, and asked what kind of sleeping medicine he had taken. Ana Luz gave him the box of pills.
“How many of these did he take?” the doctor said.
“One, ordinarily. Last night, two.”
“Why?”
“He was nervous and upset. I thought it would be best for him to go quickly to sleep.”
“Did the possibility that he might not awaken from a double dose of this drug never occur to you?” The doctor shook the box of pills at her. “Are you not aware that heart patients must be particularly careful with sleeping medicines? What kind of a nurse are you?”
Ana Luz flushed, but she answered steadily enough. She was not a registered nurse, more of a practical nurse and companion. The pills had been prescribed by a doctor in Lima. She had followed the instructions for their use which were on the box, if the police doctor cared to read them.
He didn’t like the way she said it, but he didn’t carry his questioning any further.
I had my own ideas about the extra sleeping pill. It wouldn’t have done for Berrien to wake up and start rin
ging the bell while Ana Luz was in my cabin. But Mousy didn’t even bother to ask why Berrien had been nervous and upset. He just wanted to go through the formalities and get the job finished.
Ana Luz couldn’t tell him much more about Berrien, only that he didn’t have any family that she knew of and that he was a naturalized Peruvian. She thought he had been born in Austria, although she wasn’t sure. Mousy questioned the other passengers and learned that the poker game had broken up a few minutes after Harris and I left it. Jeff, who was banking, had most of the chips, and the game was shorthanded even before Raul followed me out. Jeff had played showdown for the rest of the chips on the table and won them all before Raul got back. He and Raul had said good night to Sparks on the boat deck and gone straight to their cabins. They hadn’t known anything about Berrien’s death until the next morning.
Mousy said to nobody in particular, “So at the time of the disturbance in Señor Berrien’s cabin, all of the passengers, with the exception of Señor Colby and Señorita Benavides, were alone and unwatched. Any one of them could have been the person in Señor Berrien’s cabin.”
The fat Peruvian who had the cabin next to Berrien’s jumped in at that. He had been in bed with his wife. Mousy qualified his statement. Then he pointed out that there were forty or fifty officers and crew aboard the Talca who didn’t have wives in their beds to alibi them. Then, by one of the neatest processes of rea-sorting I ever heard, he concluded that, since Berrien’s body bore no marks, he had very probably died in his sleep, possibly because of an overdose of sleeping medicine administered in accordance with a proper prescription. There had been no crime of violence, and no crime of theft, because nothing seemed to have been stolen from the cabin. In fact, there had been no crime of any kind to require action by the law, unless the autopsy developed something unexpected. The passengers were free to go after they had left their names and next addresses. They were reminded that the Peruvian law required them to register at the nearest prefectura within twenty-four hours after their arrival in any Peruvian city.
Even the captain, who had the best reasons for wanting the business cleaned up as quickly as possible, looked startled. Ana Luz said, “But what of Señor Berrien’s body? And his—property?”
