Huckleberry Finished

by Livia J. Washburn

  I recognized his voice. “Captain?”

  “That’s right. I’m Captain L. B. Williams. You’re the head of Dickinson Literary Tours?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. If you don’t mind, can I ask what this is all about?”

  Evidently I couldn’t, because he didn’t answer me. Instead he asked another question of his own.

  “A man named Ben Webster booked passage on the Southern Belle through your agency?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Dickinson, but Mr. Webster is dead.”

  In the back of my mind, I’d been halfway expecting that. The other half had been worried that Webster had done something to damage the boat. So I felt both relief and shock, mostly shock, at the news he was dead.

  Then it was all shock as Captain Williams stepped aside so that I could see through the partially open door into what was evidently a storage closet of some sort. The only thing stored in there now was a body. Somebody had crammed Ben Webster into the locker, doubling up his arms and legs so that he would fit. No way he could have gotten in there like that himself, I thought.

  He hadn’t broken his own neck, either. I could tell by the odd angle of his head that his neck was broken. He hadn’t committed suicide. He hadn’t tried to hide in the locker and accidentally killed himself.

  No, Ben Webster had been murdered, sure as anything, I thought.

  “You seem to be taking this awfully calmly, Ms. Dickinson,” Williams commented. “Did you already know that Mr. Webster was dead?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that no, the only reason I was able to handle this catastrophe without falling apart was that I had a little experience with murder, from the time Luke and I took a tour group to the plantation.

  But I never got the words out, because it suddenly didn’t matter that I had seen murder victims before. I hadn’t seen this murder victim. I hadn’t looked into Ben Webster’s wide, staring eyes that no longer saw anything, or noted that the tip of his tongue stuck out a little between his lips, or thought about how, if rigor mortis had already set in, whoever took him out of the locker might have to break his arms and legs just to straighten him out again. All of that was new, and it was too much.

  I felt my eyes rolling up in their sockets and was aware that I was falling backward. That was all I knew before I passed out.

  When I came to and opened my eyes, Captain Williams had taken off his captain’s cap and was fanning my face with it. I was lying on something soft, and I had to squint against the breeze Williams was stirring up and tilt my head to see that I was lying in Logan Rafferty’s lap.

  I let out a yelp and started trying to struggle into a sitting position. “Get off me!” I said to Rafferty.

  “You’re mixed up, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “I believe you’re the one on me.”

  “Yeah, but I was unconscious! That’s the only way I’d ever be anywhere near your lap, you…you…”

  While I was sputtering in indignation, Captain Williams said, “Are you all right, Ms. Dickinson?”

  “I just fainted, that’s all.” Too much champagne and not enough food, I thought. That, and the sight of a corpse crammed into a storage locker.

  “You didn’t hit your head when you fell, or anything like that?”

  I had managed to sit up. I tugged my dress down with one hand and patted my head with the other, feeling for any goose eggs. I didn’t find any.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “At least I will be if one of you gentlemen will help me up.”

  Two of the three other men standing in the corridor wore white trousers and dark blue shirts. That was the uniform the stewards and other crew members wore. The third man was in khaki work clothes. The grease stains on his hands told me he probably tended the engines.

  Rafferty had stood up. He took my hand and lifted me to my feet. Instinctively, I brushed myself off, even though the corridor floor seemed pretty clean.

  “I apologize,” Williams said. “I admit that I intended to shock you by showing you Webster’s body, Ms. Dickinson. I thought that if you knew anything about his death, you might blurt it out.”

  I glanced at Rafferty. “Sounds like something you would do.”

  He held up his hands and shook his head. “The captain’s running this show. He’s the final authority on this boat.”

  “Well, within reason,” Williams said. “I’m afraid that in circumstances such as these, I’ll have to defer to the law. Call the Hannibal police, Mr. Rafferty.”

  Rafferty hesitated. “We don’t know when or where Webster was killed. If it was while we were still on the river, before we docked, the State Police will have jurisdiction.”

  That answered my question about who was responsible for law enforcement on the Mississippi, I thought.

  “We’ll start by notifying the authorities in Hannibal,” Williams decided. “If they want to, they can call in the State Police.”

  Rafferty shrugged, took out his cell phone, and walked off down the corridor to make the call.

  The captain’s plan sounded logical to me. Let the cops sort it all out and decide what to do next. Whoever was in charge of the investigation, I intended to cooperate fully with them.

  Which meant I’d have to tell them that Ben Webster had had a run-in earlier in the day with Logan Rafferty. I glanced at Rafferty from the corner of my eye.

  He was big enough to break somebody’s neck, that was for sure. He was considerably taller and heavier than Webster, and in his job as head of security for the riverboat, he’d probably had some training in handling passengers who had lost their temper and gotten violent, as well as practical experience. I didn’t doubt for a second that he was capable of killing Ben Webster, at least physically.

  I wasn’t sure why he would have done such a thing, though. He had seemed satisfied with telling Webster he had to get off the boat when it docked in Hannibal.

  But what if Webster had tried to cause more trouble after fooling me with that cabin trick? If Rafferty had caught him in the middle of committing some sort of sabotage, and the two of them had struggled…

  It seemed reasonable to me. The problem was that if such a thing had happened, Rafferty could have just told the truth about it. It was his job to protect the Southern Belle, after all. He wouldn’t have needed to hide Webster’s body and try to cover up what had happened. There would have been an investigation, of course, and the incident might have hurt the riverboat’s reputation and gotten Rafferty in trouble with the owner, Charles Gallister, but I was convinced that he wouldn’t have been charged with anything if things had happened according to the scenario I laid out in my head.

  Somebody else would have to sort that out. There was also the operator of the roulette wheel to consider. Webster had accused him of cheating and taken a swing at him. However, I thought it was pretty unlikely the fella would have tracked Webster down later and killed him over that.

  As those thoughts were going through my head, Captain Williams turned to me and asked, “When was the last time you saw Mr. Webster?”

  “Earlier this afternoon.” I hesitated.

  “Mr. Rafferty has told me about the incident in the casino involving Mr. Webster,” Williams said. “You don’t have to worry about revealing anything you shouldn’t.”

  “Well, in that case, it was right after that when I saw Webster last. I went with him back to his cabin and told him to get his things together so he could leave the boat when it docked here in Hannibal.”

  I didn’t say anything about the cabin switcheroo Webster had pulled. For one thing, it made me look sort of dumb, and for another, despite being the captain of the riverboat, Williams wasn’t a police officer. I didn’t have to answer his questions.

  The trick about the cabins indicated to me that Webster had been up to something, so I knew I’d have to tell the cops about it. Until that time came, I intended to keep that bit of information to myself.

  “Did he have any trouble with an
y of the other members of your tour group?”

  That was the sort of question the cops would ask, too. But I could answer it honestly by shaking my head and saying, “Not that I know of.” I asked a question of my own. “Who found Webster’s body?”

  Williams nodded toward the man in khakis and grease stains. “Henry here. He’s one of our engineers.”

  I looked at the man and asked, “Is this some sort of storage closet?”

  “That’s right, ma’am,” he answered. “We keep mostly tools in it. I opened the door to get a wrench I needed to adjust one of the valves on the boilers.”

  I forced myself to look into the closet again and saw that Webster’s body had been shoved up against shelves that contained wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, plastic boxes full of assorted nuts and bolts and washers, and a lot of other stuff that I didn’t know what it was.

  “Do you have to get things out of here pretty often?” I asked.

  Henry shrugged and shook his head. “Not really. We keep the engines and boilers in top-notch shape, so they don’t need much work except for routine maintenance, and all that’s done while the boat’s docked in St. Louis. It’s not unusual for us to make several cruises without anybody ever having to open this door.”

  If someone knew that, they would also know that the supply closet wasn’t a bad place to stash a body. There was at least a chance no one would discover it until the Southern Belle returned to St. Louis. To me, that seemed to indicate that the killer was somebody pretty familiar with the operation of the riverboat.

  Like Logan Rafferty, I thought as the man himself came back along the corridor.

  “The cops will be here in a few minutes,” he announced.

  Captain Williams frowned at me. “I didn’t care for the tone of those questions you were asking, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “You seem to think that a member of my crew could be responsible for what happened to Mr. Webster.”

  “Well, you’ve got to admit it’s a possibility,” I said. “Shoot, right now everybody on the boat’s a suspect, isn’t that right?”

  “There are close to a hundred passengers on board,” Williams said, his voice cool. “Webster was a passenger. I’d say that’s where you’ll find the killer.”

  “I don’t plan on findin’ the killer,” I said. “That’s a job for the police.”

  And I sure hoped that it worked out that way this time.

  CHAPTER 7

  As Rafferty had predicted, it didn’t take long for the cops to show up. Captain Williams sent one of the crew members up to the main deck to wait for them to arrive and bring them down here. The steward came back a few minutes later with a woman in plain clothes and two uniformed men following him.

  The woman took the lead, saying, “Captain Williams? I’m Detective Charlotte Travis from the Hannibal Police Department.”

  She was a few years younger than me, around thirty-five, I guessed. Thick blond hair hung to her shoulders. She was pretty but didn’t try to make anything out of it. That wouldn’t stop men from looking at her appreciatively, though. Rafferty sure did.

  Williams shook hands with her and introduced himself. “Captain L. B. Williams, Detective. This is my head of security, Logan Rafferty.” He nodded toward the big man.

  “Yes, I actually spoke to Mr. Rafferty when he placed the nine-one-one call. The dispatcher transferred his call to me.”

  I suspected that Hannibal had a fairly small police department. That was probably why the 911 dispatcher had contacted Detective Travis first, rather than sending out some uniformed officers to the scene and letting them call in the detective, as it would have been done in a bigger city.

  Williams introduced the other crew members who were there, then said, “And this is Ms. Delilah Dickinson.”

  Travis looked curiously at me. “Do you work on the riverboat, too, Ms. Dickinson?”

  “No, I’m a travel agent,” I told her. “Mr. Webster booked his cruise through my agency, and I’m leading the tour.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” the detective asked me with a frown. “Did you discover the body?”

  “No, that was Henry here,” Williams said.

  Travis shook her head. “There are too many people here.” She turned to the uniformed officers who’d accompanied her. “Take everybody except the captain and the man who discovered the body and hold them somewhere else for the time being, until I send for them.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Rafferty protested. “I’m the head of security. I ought to be here.”

  “You will be when I’m ready to talk to you,” Travis said. “Until then, maybe your office would be a good place for you and the rest of these people to wait.”

  Rafferty didn’t like it, but after a second he gave a surly shrug. The cops shepherded us back along the corridor and up two sets of stairs to the deck where the security office was located.

  As we went through the room where the video monitors were located, I asked Rafferty, “Are there any security cameras below decks?”

  “You mean in the corridor where that storage closet is?” He shook his head. “Most of our video coverage is of the casino.”

  That came as no surprise. The casino was where the money was, after all.

  “You’ve got to have some cameras out on deck, though,” I said.

  He grunted. “You ask too many questions.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I was curious about what happened to Ben Webster, of course, and it bothered me that somebody had killed one of my clients. I thought that was a natural enough reaction. But it wasn’t my job to find the killer, I reminded myself again.

  Still, I glanced at the monitors as the cops took us through to Rafferty’s office, just to get an idea of which areas on the boat the cameras covered.

  The office was crowded with six people in it, especially when one of them was Rafferty. The cops told us to sit down and wait, but there weren’t that many chairs. I didn’t feel much like sitting, anyway, so I wound up crossing my arms and pacing back and forth. I couldn’t even do that well, since there wasn’t much room to pace.

  Rafferty looked at me from behind his desk and said, “You don’t think I had anything to do with that kid getting killed, do you?”

  Before I could answer—and I wasn’t sure what I would have said, anyway—one of the cops held up a finger and said, “No talking about the case. Detective Travis wouldn’t like that.”

  Rafferty snorted. “What, you think we have to get our stories straight or something?”

  “I can tell you this much,” I said to the cop. “Mr. Rafferty and I aren’t likely to be conspiring together on anything.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” Rafferty said. He didn’t have to add that the feeling was dislike.

  The two stewards, if that’s what they were, just looked uncomfortable. I’m not normally a hostile person, but something about Logan Rafferty brought out the worst in me, I guess.

  We waited in silence for a while after that. It got on my nerves, and it must have bothered Rafferty, too. He grinned at the uniformed officers and said, “That Detective Travis is sort of hot, isn’t she, boys?”

  One of the cops cleared his throat and looked away. The other one just stonily ignored Rafferty. That seemed like a pretty good policy to me.

  Finally the radio attached to one cop’s belt squawked. He answered the call, and I heard Travis order, “Bring Mr. Rafferty down here.”

  The cop actually said, “Ten-four,” and hung his radio back on its belt clip. He nodded to Rafferty and jerked a thumb toward the door. “Let’s go.”

  That left the other cop watching me and the two stewards. It was a good thing we weren’t desperate criminals, I thought.

  Rafferty was gone for a long time. I was getting bored, and worse, I was hungry. Those appetizers I’d grabbed in the dining room hadn’t lasted long. I guess seeing a dead body and fainting had burned off all the champagne, too. If I felt lightheaded now, it was from being famished
. I’ve always had a healthy appetite. Most petite Southern ladies do, once you get to know them.

  I didn’t expect to get anything to eat anytime soon, though. The murder investigation was more important than a growling stomach. I worried that Detective Travis would want to question the two stewards before she got around to me, and that it would be the middle of the night or later before she was done with me.

  But when the cop brought Rafferty back to the office, he pointed at me and said, “You’re next, ma’am. If you’ll come with me…?”

  I didn’t even try to ask him any questions on our way below decks. I knew he wouldn’t answer them.

  I was sort of hoping that Ben Webster’s body had been taken away by now, but when we reached the corridor I saw that it was still stuffed into the storage closet. Crime scene technicians in Missouri State Police uniforms were photographing it and scouring the area around the door for evidence. Travis had moved back well away from the scene. Captain Williams was gone. I supposed that Travis had finished questioning him and told him to go back to running the boat. Not that there was probably much that needed to be done while we were docked, I thought.

  “Ms. Dickinson,” Travis began, “you’re the owner and operator of Dickinson Literary Tours?” She had an open notebook in her hand, but she didn’t consult it before asking me the question.

  “That’s right. I have a couple of employees, but it’s my agency.”

  “Are either of those employees here on the Southern Belle?”

  I shook my head. “No, they’re back at the office in Atlanta. Well, they’re not there right now, you understand, since it’s, what, nearly midnight?”

  She didn’t directly respond to that, just said, “So you’re handling this tour by yourself?”

  “That’s right. It’s a relatively small tour, only about forty clients, and the arrangements were simple. There’s really not that much that can go—”

  I stopped, and for a second I thought Detective Travis might smile. But she didn’t. She said, “You were about to say there’s not much that can go wrong, weren’t you?”