by Frances
Standing so bemused, looking at nothing in particular, Bill Weigand began to feel that odd, largely intangible, creeping sensation which sometimes results from being surreptitiously looked at. Bill did not immediately alter his position; he tried, more practically, to determine, without himself moving, from what direction he might, subconsciously, have noted movement. Presumably from the windows of one of the staterooms which overlooked the gun cases.
Bill shook his head, pantomiming bewilderment—which, at the moment, came easily. Then he crouched in front of the nearest case and began, intently, to examine as ordinary a padlock as he could remember to have seen.
The window directly above him was, as he had noticed earlier, protected by venetian blinds, set to slant downward toward the deck. Bill looked up, quickly, at the window above him.
He saw eyes and part—not enough—of a face. Then he saw movement, and then nothing.
From the height of the eyes, from what he had been able to see of the face, the observer had been a man. The man had not wanted to be caught looking. Which, since the spectacle of a detective staring moodily at locked boxes might legitimately interest almost anyone, was worth considering. Bill Weigand considered it briefly and again looked up. This time he saw nothing between the slats of the blinds. He stood up, resisted the impulse to do a little carefree whistling, and sauntered—he could not resist that—to the nearest door off the deck. He stepped over the high sill, and turned right. The three staterooms which overlooked the boxes were P 19, P 21 and P 23.
The doors of the rooms were closed. The room from which the observer—almost certainly a man—had looked out was P 21. Bill knocked on it, expecting nothing. He got nothing. He turned the doorknob and found it locked. Bill walked aft through the starboard passageway. The other room from which the cases could be observed, although less easily, was P 25. He went down to A Deck and to the purser’s office.
Stateroom P 21 was occupied by Mrs. and Miss Macklin. And Mr. and Mrs. Carl Buckley occupied P 19. The occupants of P 23 were named Conklin, which struck no note at all. But Respected Captain J. R. Folsom occupied, alone, stateroom P 25—from which he could have kept an angled eye on his arsenal.
Bill went aft to the sun deck, and found only a few sunning, the Norths and Dorian not among them. He went down to the promenade deck, and observed that Mr. and Mrs. Buckley were among the swimmers—and that Staff Captain Smythe-Hornsby was permitting himself an off-duty drink, in the company of Mr. Hammond Jones.
Bill found an unoccupied deck chair in the sun and paused to consider.
At a certain stage—Bill could remember very few cases in which this had not been true—a shape of things begins to form in the attentive mind. The shape is vague at first—amorphous at the center and, at the circumference, diffusing into mist. But the shape is there—the incipient shape. The task, thereafter, is one of definition. When the shape begins to appear, no little part of the job is done, although the hardest part may still remain.
But the circumstances which had led to the death of J. Orville Marsh, to the attack on young Cholly Pinkham, had, still, no semblance of a shape. Bill went back over it—went to Folsom’s sudden appearance at a stateroom door; to the varied—and still incomprehensible—effects of the dead detective. He considered Mrs. Macklin’s shrill, almost hysterical, assertion that someone had prowled her room—an assertion to which events of the past few minutes gave some confirmation. Someone, not Mrs. Macklin and not her daughter, had stood at the window of the room and peered out of it—and had got out of the room long before Bill reached the door. (Or, still in it, had merely waited for Bill to go away?) He tried to fit, with these things, the search of his own stateroom and the oddly half-hearted attack on Pam North. Bill smiled faintly to himself over the last. Since she had not been hurt, nor Jerry either, the occurrence had had its almost comic aspects. He sought to add to these things the presence on the Carib Queen of a polished young man who might once have involved himself in the theft of jewels, and he considered, also, the apparent determination of a physically attractive young woman to put her worst foot forward.
And no shape appeared. One could not, as Pam had previously pointed out, add apples and elephants. There was no shape—and there was no glaring absence of shape. Distortion may mean as much as conformity; the just perceptibly erratic behavior of an orbit-following celestial body may hint at the presence of another body previously unseen and lead to a search for it.… It was proving easy to grow drowsy in the sun. And then something in Bill’s mind said, “Wait.” Obediently, Bill waited. A glimmer came to him.
About the murder itself there had been a kind of preposterousness. It was as if a prank had been played—an absurd, unlikely prank—and had got out of hand. There was something outrageous about it, and something incongruous. That the sword had been sharpened to cut a wedding cake in Worcester, Massachusetts, was somehow the final touch.
But the attack on Pinkham had been, in method and execution, as unlike the murder of Marsh as one act of violence can easily be unlike another. On the young steward, a blackjack had been used—from the nature of the wound, that was almost certain. And a blackjack is as professional as a sawed-off shotgun. Bill had been a policeman too long, encountered too many of the vagaries of crime, to believe that a murderer always limits himself to one weapon. But a sword and a blackjack—and then, with Pam North, the mere laying on of heavy hands. Variety was being carried to extremes.
Bill considered this distortion. It occurred to him that the distortion might have been provided for that very purpose—the confusion of a diligent detective. It was, of course, also conceivable that several things were going on at the same time—which would be disorderly of them, but not unprecedented.
It was, Bill thought, all very disorderly. The atmosphere of a pleasure cruise and a murder investigation fitted as badly together as a sword and a blackjack. Embarked on such a cruise, people leave their backgrounds behind them. But a crime is like an iceberg, floating for the most part submerged—the iceberg in its ocean, the crime in its past.
He left the sunny chair and went forward, stopping at the purser’s bureau. There he made a request that Mr. Jules Barron be paged and, on his response, asked to attend the captain in his cabin. Bill then walked forward, to inform Captain Cunningham of a visitor to be expected. He went through the smoke room on his way.
Respected Captain J. R. Folsom and Mrs. Macklin were together at a table, with drinks in front of them. Folsom appeared to be doing most of the talking. On the other hand, Mrs. Macklin seemed to be doing most of the drinking. Folsom had an untouched glass in front of him. Hers was almost empty.
The Norths were, rather uncharacteristically, drinking tea. It had been Pam who suggested it, after they had, by mutual consent, left the movie at its middle. They might, she said, as well find out what went on “up there.” Up there was the Grand Lounge, which was across the Grand Entrance from the smoke room as one went forward on the sun deck of the Carib Queen. In the Grand Lounge dwelt dignity, and what was going on was tea.
The lounge was a large room, stretching the width of the ship, with wide windows on three sides. Its frequenters turned out to be somewhat older, on the average, than those of the smoke room, although a younger group clustered at a piano and told each other to play “that” and then sang to “that,” but in moderate voices. Elsewhere bridge went on, and canasta and the serving of tea. The Norths had tea and small, neat sandwiches, and looked through a window at the sparkling south Atlantic. Or was it already the Caribbean, or even the Gulf of Mexico? “They ought to mark them,” Pam said, and poured more tea, which really they ought to drink oftener. The idea of labeling such large bodies of water engaged them both, and they proposed methods—Pam had an idea that it might somehow be done with kites, at least in pleasant weather. It was agreeable, for once, to have nothing to do except label oceans.
But the public-address system, although its tone was dulcet, brought them back. It requested that Mr. Jules Barron c
ommunicate with the purser. And it was at precisely that moment that Pam, looking around the pleasant room at the pleasant people, found that three of the people were Mr. and Mrs. Furstenberg and Hilda Macklin.
They were at a table, across the room from the Norths, and teacups were in front of them—and Hilda was leaning a little forward, talking with what seemed, as seen from a distance, to be marked concentration. Furstenberg listened to her gravely, and shook his head—but whether in negation, or perhaps in sympathy, was only to be guessed. There was an expression of gravity, also on Mrs. Furstenberg’s cheerful face.
“Will Mr. Jules Barron please communicate with the purser?” the public-address system asked, for the second time. And then it seemed to Pam, still watching the three—the perhaps rather oddly assorted three?—that the repetition of the request interrupted Hilda Macklin, and that she broke off, as if in mid-sentence, and raised her head as if listening. And this, if true, was somewhat interesting.
And then, from the group around the piano, a good-looking—an almost dashing—dark young man detached himself and began to walk through the room toward the door.
It was, Pam realized, the same dark young man who had—perhaps—made some slight efforts to strike up an acquaintance with Hilda Macklin, and had seemed to get nowhere.
If it was also Mr. Jules Barron, on his way to communicate with the purser, it would be—perhaps—quite interesting, although precisely why it should be was not immediately apparent, even to Pam herself.
If Bill hadn’t left them out of the party in the captain’s quarters before lunch, she wouldn’t have to wonder if the man was Jules Barron. For that exclusion, Bill almost deserved not to be told that at the mention of Barron’s name Hilda had—perhaps—broken off what she was saying and made a gesture of sudden attention, even of surprise. Almost deserved—but, of course, not quite.
8
Apparently Mr. Jules Barron had assumed his summons was to another party. He did not say so. But, finding only Captain Cunningham and Weigand in the captain’s quarters, he permitted dark eyebrows to rise in polite enquiry. He was told, by Captain Cunningham, that it was good of him to come. Cunningham then looked at Weigand and waited.
“We have a problem, Mr. Barron,” Bill said. “We think you may be able to help us.”
“Me?” Barron said, and then added that he doubted it, but that, of course, anything he could do.
“Right,” Bill said. “The problem we have concerns a murder. A man named Marsh has been killed.”
This time, Barron’s eyebrows indicated astonishment.
“On the boat?” he asked, and Cunningham winced slightly, and Bill said, “Right, Mr. Barron. Mr. Marsh was a private detective.” To this, Jules Barron, who was gayly arrayed, said he didn’t get it. He looked from one to another, and repeated that he didn’t get it. “Why me?” he asked, amplifying.
“The photographs of jewelry,” Bill said. “The ones we were looking at earlier. Mr. Marsh had them in his possession when he was killed.”
Then, Barron’s eyes narrowed, just perceptibly.
“Your wife’s great-aunt,” he said, to Captain Cunningham. “So that was a lot of baloney. You know, it sounded like baloney.”
He looked at Weigand, then.
“So,” he said, “what’s it got to do with me?”
But his eyes were wary, and it was evident he could guess. He sat down.
“I think,” Bill told him, “you had seen those photographs before, Mr. Barron. Or—the things themselves. You were anxious to get your hands on them. And, when you did, all you needed was a quick glance.”
“All right,” Barron said. “That’s what you think. So that’s what you think.”
“It isn’t true?”
Weigand was damn’ right, it wasn’t true. The varnish came off Barron’s speech. Cops could make mistakes. It wouldn’t be the first time—He stopped.
“No,” Bill said. “Not the first time, is it?”
“Oh, I get it,” Barron said. “I get it all right. Because there was this little mix-up about an old dame who couldn’t remember where she put her pretties—” He broke off again, with a rather elaborate shrug. “Nobody charged me with anything. They wanted a fall-guy and tried me for size. And, I didn’t fit. So they said, ‘Sorry, please’—only they didn’t, you can bet on that. All they said was ‘Scram!’ So now you come along.”
He stood up. He displayed indignation, presumably righteous. He spoke to Captain Cunningham, and got some of the varnish on again. He said that if that was all it was—
“No,” Bill said. “Sit down, Mr. Barron.”
“You,” Barron said, “are off your beat, aren’t you?”
He looked hard at Bill Weigand, then at the captain. He was looked back at, harder.
“You can take it, Mr. Barron,” Cunningham said, “that Captain Weigand has got himself a new beat. As he said, sit down.”
And Jules Barron sat down, which came as rather a surprise to Captain Cunningham, and interested Bill Weigand not a little, since he was off his beat and since Cunningham’s authority, while considerable, did not really extend to the forcible detention of passengers. It appeared that Barron had had a change of mind, and a rather sudden one.
“This woman who lost her jewelry,” Bill said. “What was her name, by the way?”
“Morgan,” Barron said. “Believe it or not. And I was clean on it. Couldn’t have been cleaner.”
“She got it back?” Bill said.
Barron said, “Yeah. She got it back.”
He paused a moment, and spoke quickly. “That’s the way I heard it,” he said. “I didn’t know a damn’ thing about it. Not about any of it.”
“Through a contact?” Bill asked him.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Possibly,” Bill said, “through a private detective? Working with the thieves and with the agency—both sides of the street?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You’ve heard of that being done?”
“Sure,” Barron said. “I’ve heard of it. Who hasn’t?”
“Mr. Barron,” Bill said, “did you know Mr. Marsh? Was he involved in this—mix-up?”
“Never heard of him,” Barron said. “As to whether he was in the Morgan deal—that is, helped get back Mrs. Morgan’s stuff—how would I know? I don’t know a damn’ thing, like I told you.”
And then, suddenly, Barron, who had been looking at nothing in particular while he spoke, looked up at Bill Weigand—and smiled. There was in the smile precisely what Bill least wanted to see—confidence. But there had been a moment—the moment when Barron had been stared down, failed, as he might have, to walk out of the captain’s quarters—when Bill had thought Jules Barron was not confident at all.
The answer was as easy to guess as it was discouraging to contemplate—if, in relation to Jules Barron, there was a track to get on, Bill had got off it.
“To get back to the jewelry in the photographs,” Bill said. “Had you ever seen it before?”
“No,” Barron said.
“Not the photographs? Nor the things themselves—a bracelet, two necklaces, a diamond ring?”
“No.”
“You did want to look at them?”
“Everybody else was,” Barron told him. “I’m as curious as the next guy.” He looked at Captain Cunningham. “Quite a story about this great-aunt,” he said. “Quite a story.” He paused. He looked at Bill Weigand and his gaze was shrewd. “All for my benefit?” he asked.
He was not directly answered.
“How did you happen to come on this cruise?” Bill asked him, and was merely casting at random, and hoped it was not too evident.
Barron’s eyebrows, which had been at rest, went up.
“Why does anybody?” he said. “Read about it. Thought it might be fun. Had a little loose cash.”
“Didn’t know anybody who was going to take the trip?”
“I tell you,” Barron said, “the way I see it, y
ou always meet people. New faces. See what I mean?”
“Elderly women with money?” Bill asked him.
Barron did not look angry. He merely looked amused.
“Is there a law against it?” he asked, as man of the world to man of the world.
He was told he could go. He went smiling, and the smile was confident.
“A rather unpleasant young man,” Captain Cunningham said. “But—”
“Right,” Bill said. “He’d seen the jewelry before—the pictures or the real thing. But as you say—but.” He lighted a cigarette and looked at it. “Didn’t ask the right questions,” he said. “I’m afraid it comes to that.”
“But there are right questions?”
Bill shrugged. He said he hoped so, that he thought so.
“Usually,” Captain Cunningham said. “Usually, on trips like this, there’ll be several middle-aged women traveling by themselves. Widows, y’know—children grown up. That sort of thing. Pretty much at loose ends, the old gals are. Not rolling in it, or they take world cruises. But not hard up by a long shot—and lonely. My grandmother’s day, they’d have settled down to it—tea with the vicar. That sort of thing. Some of these haven’t, if you take me.”
Bill nodded his head. He took the captain without difficulty.
“Brings men of Barron’s type, y’know,” the captain said. “Bound to, I’m afraid. Could be that’s all there is to it, eh? Might account for Barron’s getting the wind up, you think?”
The trouble was, Bill pointed out, that Barron hadn’t got the wind up—or, if he had momentarily, had quickly got it down again. But the captain’s theory might account for Barron.
“One trouble is,” Bill said, “we may be looking at the wrong group entirely. Under normal circumstances, we pretty much know our group—that much, anyway. Here—” He spread his hands. “There are no sure relationships,” he said. “We’re merely all in the same boat.”
