Huckleberry Finished

by Livia J. Washburn

  Eddie growled. Literally growled. Louise put a hand on his arm to calm him.

  “He wouldn’t have been able to resist the challenge,” Mark went on. “He’s the sort of man who thinks he can charm any woman he wants to.”

  I recalled him trying that charm on Detective Travis. When it hadn’t worked, Gallister had gotten angry. Hannah’s condition when she was murdered, though, seemed to indicate that Gallister’s efforts had been successful where she was concerned—if there was anything to this except blue sky.

  “Let’s say he meets her at the law firm, he goes after her, and she falls for his line,” I said. “He gets her the job on this boat. Easy enough for him to do, since he owns the Southern Belle. Then she turns up pregnant. What would she do then?”

  “If you’re thinking that she would try to blackmail him, you’re wrong,” Louise said. “Hannah would never do such a thing.”

  As gently as he could, Mark said, “You can’t be sure about that, Louise—”

  “But I am,” she insisted. “I knew my daughter, Mark. She wasn’t a blackmailer.”

  “And you’re probably right about that,” I told her. “But Gallister didn’t know her that well. If he found out she was pregnant, he could have been afraid that she’d try to shake him down, whether she actually would have or not.”

  Eddie said, “Does this guy Gallister already have a wife?”

  Mark nodded. “He does. She comes from old money, too. That’s how Gallister got his start in business. He charmed the right woman.”

  “Does she know he plays around?”

  “I’m not privy to their private life,” Mark said, “but again, going by gossip, she knows. That’s why she hasn’t been completely sober for a lot of years now. But they’re still married, and I’ll bet Gallister would take quite a financial hit if they weren’t together anymore.”

  Eddie started toward the stairs. “Where’s that lady cop? We’ve got to tell her all this before Gallister has a chance to get away.”

  “Wait a minute,” I told him. “We can’t prove any of it. We’re just talking about what might have happened.”

  Eddie glared at Mark. “You’re a detective. Get proof.”

  “A year after the crime, I’m not sure how we’re going to do that,” Mark said. “Anyway, if Gallister wanted to get rid of Hannah, he wouldn’t do it himself. He’d hire it done, and he’d use a professional. If we’re right about this, whoever actually killed her is probably long gone. They could be halfway around the world by now.”

  “I don’t care about that. Gallister would be the one who’s really responsible for what happened. He’s got to pay,” Eddie replied.

  “If he’s guilty,” Mark said. He frowned in thought for a moment and then grimaced. “There’s one thing I can think of that we can do….”

  “Then we should do it,” Louise said.

  “It’s not pleasant,” Mark warned.

  Eddie snapped, “Nothing about your daughter being murdered is pleasant. What’s your idea, Lansing?”

  “You could have Hannah’s body exhumed and have DNA testing done on the baby she was carrying. Then, if you could get a DNA sample from Gallister, you could see if there was a match. You couldn’t actually prove he was the father that way—DNA’s not as exact as most people like to think it is—but you could determine whether the father was either Gallister or a close male relative of his. And since, as far as I know, he doesn’t have any male relatives that close”—Mark shrugged—“that would be enough proof for a jury, if it turned out the DNA matched. There’s only one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Louise asked.

  “Getting Gallister to give you a DNA sample. If he knows that he was the father of Hannah’s baby, he’s going to guess right away why you want it, and he’ll balk.”

  “Make him cooperate,” Eddie said. “Get a court order.”

  Mark shook his head. “He’s got one of the biggest and best law firms in the Midwest working for him. Actually, it’s one of the best in the whole country. If you file a civil action against him and try to force him to give you a DNA sample that way, he’ll fight it as long as his money holds out…and that’s going to be a lot longer than yours does.”

  I saw Eddie’s shoulders slump and said, “Wouldn’t that be the same as him admitting it, if he wouldn’t cooperate?”

  “Not legally. You can’t force a man to give you his DNA if he doesn’t want to, not without a judge on your side.”

  “What about the cops?” I asked. “If they went after him—”

  “First you’d have to convince them to investigate him,” Mark said, “and based on the evidence we have, which is pretty much nothing, I don’t think you’d have any luck with that. Even if you did manage to interest the police, Gallister would fight just as hard to prevent the DNA test, and he’d drag it out for years, maybe.”

  “What if you—”

  He held up a hand to stop me. “Got a DNA sample without him being aware of it? Dug through his trash and found a cup or a napkin or something with his saliva on it?”

  Louise made a face. So did I. It was a pretty distasteful idea.

  “It wouldn’t be admissible as evidence,” Mark went on. “Too much opportunity for the sample to be tainted or manipulated somehow. That’s why the cops place so much importance on the chain of evidence.”

  “Well, then, what the hell can we do?” Eddie burst out.

  Mark smiled. “We have to spook Gallister into making a mistake.”

  “How do we do that?” Louise asked.

  “You say that Hannah wouldn’t have blackmailed him,” Mark told her, “and you’re probably right about that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t blackmail him.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Dadgum it!” I said. “You’re talkin’ about puttin’ a target smack-dab on your back and hopin’ that he takes a shot at it!”

  Mark shrugged. “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m willing to listen.”

  That was just the problem. I didn’t have a better idea. Everything else I had come up with, he had already shot down.

  “I don’t get it,” Eddie said.

  “Mark’s going to tell Mr. Gallister he knows who the father of Hannah’s baby was,” Louise said. She had picked up right away on the plan, too. “He’ll imply that Mr. Gallister had…had Hannah killed to keep her from telling anyone that she was pregnant by him.”

  She had trouble getting the words out, and I didn’t blame her. She’d had to accept a lot of terrible things over the past year. It looked like the end might finally be in sight, though. With luck, Louise might get the closure she needed.

  But if we were right about Hannah and Gallister, I didn’t see any connection between that case and Ben Webster’s murder. My instincts kept coming back there and trying to forge some sort of link between them. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t see what it might be.

  Eddie faced Mark and said, “If you do that, Gallister’s liable to have you killed.”

  “He can try,” Mark said with a shrug. “Doesn’t mean he’ll succeed. If he makes a move against me, that might be enough to convince the cops we’re right about him. Convicting him of Hannah’s murder will still be a long, hard fight, but at least it’ll be a start.”

  “You’d do that?” Eddie asked. “You’d put yourself in danger to help get justice for my little girl?”

  “That’s the job I was hired to do.”

  Louise touched his arm. “You know that not everybody would go to such lengths for their job, Mark. You’re doing this for Eddie and me, not just for Hannah.”

  “Well…” Mark shrugged.

  Eddie stuck out a hand. “I’m sorry I took a swing at you, pal. I was outta my head because I was so mad at that jerk Gallister. Truce?”

  “Sure,” Mark said as he gripped Eddie’s hand.

  The sound of footsteps on the stairs leading up to the third deck made me turn and look. I saw a black cap rising along them, then the lean, weathered fac
e of Captain L. B. Williams came into view.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Mr. Lansing,” the captain said as he came out onto the observation deck.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Gallister must have told Williams that Mark had gotten the job as Mark Twain under false pretenses. The captain was probably here to fire him.

  Instead, to my surprise, Williams went on, “Since it appears that we’re going to be delayed here in Hannibal until tomorrow, I’d like for you to do another performance as Mark Twain tonight in the salon.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Eddie said, and I didn’t know if the upset look on his face was an act or if that was just his natural personality asserting itself again. “What do you mean we’re still stuck here?”

  Williams looked like he had just bitten into something sour. “Mr. Gallister’s attorneys have had more difficulty than they anticipated in obtaining a court order releasing the Southern Belle from the custody of the Hannibal police. It seems that the judge they planned to approach with their request is ill at the moment.”

  I found it hard to believe that a firm the size of Winston, Pine, and Blevins had only one judge in their back pocket, but since this was actually a stroke of luck for us, I wasn’t going to complain about it. With another night in Hannibal, we’d have more time to try to prod Charles Gallister into making a mistake—assuming that he was still on board. A glance at the parking area told me that the car he’d arrived in was still there, indicating that he hadn’t left the riverboat.

  I tried to confirm that by saying to Williams, “I’m surprised that Gallister hasn’t gone back down to St. Louis himself to raise heck.”

  “I wouldn’t presume to speak for Mr. Gallister,” Williams replied stiffly. “I assume he feels that he can do more good here, trying to persuade the local authorities that they should release the boat.”

  So he was definitely still on board. That was good.

  “I’ll be glad to do the performance, Captain,” Mark said. “The usual time?”

  “That will be fine.” Williams gave us all a curt nod, then turned and went to the stairs. We watched in silence as he climbed to the pilothouse.

  Once we were alone again on the observation deck, Louise said, “I thought for sure he was going to tell you that he knows you’re a private detective, Mark.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “I figured Gallister told him.”

  “We don’t know that Gallister recognized me,” Mark reminded them—and me, since the same thought had crossed my mind. “Right now it’s just a theory. One that the facts seem to support, though.”

  “Yeah, and if he did recognize you, then he’s keeping it to himself,” I said as I mulled over what had just happened. “Actually, this supports what we were thinking, because if he’s guilty of something, he wouldn’t want anybody else knowing that there’s a private eye on board. If they did, they might ask Gallister why that would be.”

  Mark thought about it and then nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. It’s in his best interest to keep everything relating to Hannah’s murder as quiet as possible.”

  “And since he saw you without your Mark Twain getup on, he probably doesn’t know you’re the one who does the performances in the salon,” I went on. “Williams came looking for you and asked you to do that tonight on his own, not because Gallister told him to.”

  Mark looked closely at me for a couple of seconds, then said, “I may not know you all that well yet, Delilah, but I’ve got a hunch you’re up to something. You’ve got some sort of plan in mind, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “How does this sound?”

  Considering how packed with activity the past twenty-four hours had been, the rest of that afternoon was strangely uneventful. With the casino and the salon closed and all the passengers confined to the boat, most folks holed up in their cabins and read or slept or sat around and complained, for all I knew. A few of them strolled the decks, obviously determined to get some fresh air and exercise even if they couldn’t go sightseeing in Hannibal, which sat there in plain sight but for the moment out of reach of everybody on the Southern Belle.

  Mark and I told Louise and Eddie to leave everything to us. They went back to their cabin, and we went to Mark’s. We had just come in the door when my phone rang. It was Melissa again, asking me about that information she had for me on my stolen computer. I made writing motions at Mark, and he handed me a pen and a piece of paper. I jotted down the numbers Melissa gave me, then told her, “See what you can find out about Charles Gallister.”

  “Who?”

  “The owner of this boat. He’s some sort of Midwest real estate mogul, too.”

  “Why do you need to know that?” Melissa asked. Before I could answer, she went on, “Never mind. I’ll bet you’re trying to do some detective work again, aren’t you?”

  “You’re the one who keeps tellin’ me stuff that makes me curious,” I told her.

  “Be careful, Mom. Remember what almost happened to you on that plantation.”

  “I’m not likely to forget it,” I said. Nearly getting stabbed tends to stick in your mind. “Call me back with whatever you find, okay?”

  “Sure. You want the dirt, right?”

  “The dirtier, the better,” I told her.

  That statement made Mark raise his eyebrows quizzically.

  “I was talking about Gallister,” I explained as I closed the phone. “Melissa’s gonna try to find out if he’s had any legal problems in the past.”

  “If he has, I’m sure they’ve been well covered up by Gerald Pine.”

  “Yeah, but the Internet’s a wonderful thing. You never know what you’re gonna find.”

  We sat down with Mark’s books by and about Mark Twain and began looking for things he could use in his performance that night. Getting Gallister to attend might be tricky, but it was important that he be there. Mark’s performance was going to set him up for the blackmail later.

  “You know,” I said as a new worry occurred to me, “you might get arrested and accused of being a real blackmailer. The cops might not believe you if you told them you were just tryin’ to spook Gallister into revealin’ his involvement with Hannah’s murder.”

  “That’s a chance I’ll have to take,” he said. “How about this one? ‘Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.’”

  “That might work,” I said as I paged through one of the volumes. “Here’s another one: ‘One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.’ Gallister’s a liar. I reckon we can be pretty sure of that.”

  “Being a liar and being a murderer are two different things.”

  “Mark Twain said that?”

  “No,” Mark said. “I did. Huck Finn said, ‘All kings is mostly rapscallions.’ Gallister is a king of sorts, at least in his own mind. He’s used to doing what he wants and getting away with it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s about to come to an end,” I predicted with more confidence than I felt.

  Late that afternoon I left Mark working on his monologue for that night’s performance and went up to the pilothouse. I ignored the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign on the stairs—I was getting good at that—and marched right up there. When I opened the door and stepped inside, I was struck by how nice the place was. Just a short time earlier in Mark’s cabin, I had read a description of a pilothouse in Life on the Mississippi:

  “…showy red and gold window curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns and ‘look at the river’; bright, fanciful ‘cuspidores,’ instead of a broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oilcloth on the floor; a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head, costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs for the bells.”

  I won’t try to fool you into thinking that I recalled all that from memory; I went and looked it up. But it was
in my mind at that moment as I looked around the interior of the Southern Belle’s pilothouse. Not everything in there was the same as in Twain’s description, of course. There were no cuspidors, nor a wood-burning stove. The floor was highly polished wood instead of being covered with oilcloth. But there were big windows with bright curtains pulled back at the moment, to give a sweeping view all around of the river and the town of Hannibal, and a high, red leather chair where the captain sat, and most of all the wheel, tall and wide and impressive with its brass fittings and its smooth, burnished wood and the sense of power that went with it because all you had to do was look at it to know that it controlled not only the course of this boat but also its destiny.

  Of course, at the moment it had nothing to do because the boat was docked and wasn’t going anywhere until a judge or Detective Travis gave the word, and I didn’t expect either of those things to happen until the next day, at the earliest.

  Captain Williams swung around in the tall swivel chair. He was the only person in the pilothouse and looked surprised to see me.

  “Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be up here. What can I do for you?”

  I smiled. “I sort of wanted to see what things look like from up here. You’ve got the best view on the boat, don’t you?”

  “The pilot does. The boat is in his hands. The captain merely gives the orders.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet you do more than that.” I sensed that he wasn’t going to respond to any flirting, so I made my tone more businesslike as I went on, “I was hopin’, too, that you could tell me where to find Mr. Gallister. He is still on the boat, isn’t he?”

  “He is,” Williams replied with a frown. “I’m not sure it would be a good idea to disturb him, though. He’s been on the phone with his attorneys all afternoon, and he’s rather upset about their lack of progress.”

  “Well, then, he needs a break,” I said. “Mark Lansing is working up a special show for tonight, so I thought I’d invite Mr. Gallister.”