EQMM, September-October 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I suspect he'll have nightmares for a while."

  "Yeah, like for the rest of his life. Especially about the skull with the bullet hole in its forehead."

  Shapiro called: “I'll need to go inside."

  "We took out everything that could be removed,” said Chamberlain, walking toward her. “Belt buckles, ring, earrings, shoe parts, buttons, pen, cigarette lighter, spent rounds, the works."

  "I need to measure the inside."

  Gingerly they climbed onto the old boat's rotting wood and he helped her inside. After she'd finished, he helped her out again.

  She studied her notebook, comparing her notes to earlier notes she'd made from registers in Salem. The men waited.

  Finally she looked up and said, “This was a cabin cruiser with an overall length of eighteen and a half feet, a hull depth of four feet, a cockpit size of five feet nine inches by six feet six, with a vee-bottom hull covered with plywood planking. It had a hundred and thirty-five horsepower motor. The head was enclosed, and the galley area had a sink and stove. I believe, Sheriff, that we have a match."

  "A match to what?"

  "A cabin cruiser named the Fayina." She spelled it for him. “It's one of the boats that went missing out of Adams County. It sailed out of Oldport just before an unexpected gale hit the coast. Two people aboard. Never seen again. Naturally everybody assumed that the storm was responsible. I'll call Salem for the names of the two people so that you can discover if these are their skeletons. That far back, probably your best bet is dental records."

  "How far back? When did this boat sail?"

  "The Fayina set out from Oldport in March of nineteen sixty-nine."

  * * * *

  "It's incredible,” was all Norman Fenwick could say. “Just incredible."

  The sixty-three-year-old man was seated in an armchair, facing Sheriff Chamberlain, who sat on the sofa across the small living room. They were in Fenwick's little house a block off Foster Road in Southeast Portland. Fenwick, of medium height and weight, had a slender face with a wide mouth. He wore a sport shirt with bluejeans and moccasins.

  "And murdered,” added Fenwick, staring down at the rug. “Not just reappearing after all these years, but reappearing murdered."

  "The identification from dental records came in late yesterday,” said Chamberlain. “I drove up here this morning to tell you. I found this house, but nobody could tell me where you worked, so I waited."

  "I manage a video store on Burnside. I'd heard on the radio about a boat found on Tangle Beach, but I never dreamed it was the Fayina. We'd all assumed it sank in the ocean."

  "When was the last time you saw your wife?"

  "The morning that the Fayina sailed. About half-past eight, standard time, on the seventh of March, nineteen sixty-nine. She was going out with Archie Randall, supposedly for whale watching, and we had words. But she went anyway. I never saw her again. I just assumed—we all assumed—that the gale that hit the coast later that day sank the Fayina, and with it Archie and Melissa. The Coast Guard searched for a couple of days but of course they were looking out at sea. No logical reason existed to look at Tangle Beach."

  Chamberlain remembered that before the resort motel had been built in 1997 the beach had been a deserted, isolated stretch, rarely visited by anyone. The rocks offshore kept ships and boats away, and helped hide the beach, whose sands tended to become soft when wet, almost like quicksand. A boat, grounded there, would lie unseen, and in a storm would be quickly sucked into the wet sand.

  "Was there no investigation?” asked Chamberlain.

  "The Adams County sheriff used to be a young fellow named Hank Axtell. He asked some questions, but it was just a formality. Everybody knew what'd happened. Or thought they did. Everybody was wrong, I guess."

  Chamberlain had a hard time thinking of Hank Axtell as “a young fellow."

  "There was also an insurance-company investigator named Pendergraft,” continued Fenwick. “I don't remember his first name. But his investigation was even more superficial than Axtell's."

  "How much was the boat insured for?"

  "The insurance was on Archie, not the boat. All of us in the partnership carried a one-hundred-grand life insurance policy on each other. We were young and thought the idea absurd, but the bank insisted on it as a condition of our start-up loan. They had insurance on each of us, too. We used most of the money buying out Archie's parents and siblings after he was declared legally dead a year later. The Randall heirs had inherited his share. As for the boat, I don't know if insurance companies write policies on kit boats."

  "Kit boats?"

  Fenwick nodded. “Archie built it himself using blueprints he bought from a company in California. It was a real beauty, too. Archie took it out several times without problems, but for years I've thought it was flawed because it sank in the storm. Now. . . . Well, I guess the flaw was that it had a third person on board."

  "Any idea who it could've been?"

  "None."

  "Was Mrs. Fenwick insured?"

  "No."

  "Where were you that day?"

  "Home until five till eleven, and at work from eleven until five."

  "Wasn't eleven late to start work?” asked Chamberlain.

  "I was the only partner to work at all that day. Only two of our three employees did. Business was slow. That's why Archie could go out on a weekday. It was a Friday and the economy was entering the Nixon recession. Our business was already in trouble."

  Chamberlain asked about the business. Fenwick explained that the partners had formed FRLS Video in 1967 to import and distribute Japanese videotape recorders at the dawn of the video era. Fenwick, Randall, Curtis Larson, and Martin Snively had all been twenty-two-year-old alumni of the Oregon Institute of Technology, where they'd met and become friends. Only Fenwick had been married, and only for a short period.

  "I married Melissa on the rebound after she'd had a fight with her boyfriend, Curtis,” said Fenwick. “She began having second thoughts almost immediately."

  "How did the company do after one of the partners disappeared?"

  "It was tough at first, especially during the recession. But we got through it, and eventually prospered. We rode out other recessions, but the ‘ninety-one recession caught us overextended. We decided to sell the company. We each got a million bucks. Curtis and Martin ran up their shares into fortunes. I moved to Portland, bought a video store on Division Street, and barely eked by until the next recession. I closed the doors in two thousand one. I had to sell all my other property to avoid bankruptcy, but paid off my debts, bought this little house, and I've just now paid off the mortgage."

  "How did you get along with Archibald Randall?"

  "We got along okay for most of the time we knew each other.” Fenwick explained how they'd met at the Institute, how Randall had been the group's video expert and movie enthusiast, but had an inflated view of his own importance in the enterprise. He'd been “coming on to” Melissa. “Our friendship was souring."

  "Was anybody else souring on Randall?"

  "I think we all were to some degree. He was too cocky. And he'd blown up at Wilford Harris the day before they sailed."

  "Who's Wilford Harris?"

  "An employee. The one who wasn't at work that day. A Vietnam vet with a great hand for mechanics but a better hand for dipping into the till. Of course, we didn't know that at the time. Curtis found out a few weeks after the Fayina's disappearance and fired him. He wanted to send him to prison, but the bank would've learned we'd had a thief on the payroll and were even weaker in business skills than it believed."

  "Where does Harris live now?"

  Fenwick shrugged. “No idea."

  "And your ex-partners?"

  "Larson lives here in Portland, up in the West Hills. Snively lives in Port Townsend, Washington. I can give you their addresses and phone numbers. But I saw them both the next day."

  "Did you see Harris that day?"

  Fenwick thought about th
e question, then shook his head. “But,” he added, “no employees worked on Saturdays."

  * * * *

  Chamberlain decided to interview Curtis Larson while in Portland and then Martin Snively in Port Townsend.

  Larson's abode was luxurious even in the upscale West Hills neighborhood: a rambling two-story olive-colored house of at least 5,000 square feet. A 2009 silver Cadillac stood in the loop driveway. The front door was answered by only the third uniformed maid Chamberlain had encountered in his life. She showed him into a room furnished with Art Deco chairs, sofa, and coffee table, where a huge window gave a magnificent view of the city. Two minutes later, Larson came in.

  "Well, this is a surprise.” Larson had a deep voice. “I rarely got a visit from the Adams County sheriff when I lived in Adams County. Sit down and tell me how I can help you."

  They sat down.

  Larson was five-ten, stocky, with puffy blue eyes in a dark, round face, framed by unruly brown hair. He had a hearing aid, and an eyeglasses case in his pocket.

  "A boat has surfaced on Tangle Beach,” said Chamberlain. “It's been positively identified as Archibald Randall's cabin cruiser, the Fayina."

  Larson paled.

  "The . . . “ he began. “After . . . Are you . . . The Fayina?"

  Larson appeared even more astonished than Fenwick.

  Chamberlain told him about the skeletons, their discovery and identification. Afterward, Larson sat in silence for a minute.

  Finally he managed: “After all these years, this is just . . . just unbelievable."

  "I'm told you dated Melissa Fenwick before her marriage."

  "Yes. We were engaged. Then we argued about something insignificant, said some stupid things, and the first thing I knew she'd married Norm. Not very happily, though. She grew tired of him fast."

  "Any idea why?"

  "She told me he was more boring than a dead sheep."

  "Ouch."

  "Anyway, soon she was making passes at me and at Archie. She was a real beauty: blond, blue-eyed, endowed with curves shaped to stop a man's heart. Archie responded a bit, even though it put him on a collision course with Norm."

  "And you?” asked Chamberlain. “Did you respond?"

  "No way. I wasn't going to irritate Norm, maybe break up the partnership. Not for Melissa Palmer. I'd written her off when she'd gotten married. Besides, I had a new romantic interest, Karen Taylor. In fact, I believe I'd already proposed to Karen before the Fayina disappeared."

  "She accepted?"

  Larson nodded. “Married for twenty-two years before we divorced,” he said. “My second marriage only lasted two."

  "Where were you the day the Fayina disappeared?"

  "Home. Business was slow, so we agreed that only Norm and a couple employees would work that Friday. I spent most of the day reading a book about investing in rural real estate. I was the entrepreneur of the bunch, Norm and Archie the film experts. Archie, of course, went out on the boat, and Marv also stayed home."

  "Any witnesses to your being home?"

  Larson shook his head.

  "I believe you received some insurance money?"

  "We each did. It came at a bad time."

  "A bad time?” said Chamberlain. “When business was so slow? It sounds like a windfall."

  "Nothing of the sort. It was a valuable infusion of cash, yes, but we had to use most of it to buy out Archie's family, who inherited his share. We didn't want a bunch of people in the firm we didn't know and who wouldn't be working there. Believe me, Sheriff, we would've rather had Archie than the money."

  "Do you remember an employee named Wilford Harris?"

  "Harris! You bet I remember that freckle-faced thief. Embezzling from us at a time we needed every cent. . . . Wait a minute. Did Harris have something to do with what happened to Archie and Melissa?"

  "I don't know, Mr. Larson. I asked about him only because Mr. Fenwick mentioned that you had three employees, but only Harris had that day off."

  Larson settled back in the chair and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  "I have a good memory for that Friday and the following Saturday,” he said at last. “You can imagine why: the continual review of those events, both in my own mind and to answer questions posed by the Coast Guard and sheriff and later an insurance investigator. Oddly, no memory for the next day, Sunday, or the following week. But those two days. . . . However, I don't remember whether Harris was at work that Friday. The payroll records would be long gone by now. If Norm says Harris wasn't at work that day, then I'd bet Harris wasn't. I just don't remember myself."

  This reinforced Chamberlain's desire to speak with Axtell and to discover where Harris was living now, assuming he was still living at all.

  "I'll tell you one thing I do remember,” added Larson. “There was an argument between Archie and Harris the day before Archie went out in the boat. But I don't know what it was about."

  "Any idea where Harris is today?"

  Larson smiled sardonically. “This all happened forty years ago, sheriff. No, I've no idea."

  "What was his job?"

  "Fixing videotape recorders. In those days, they broke down continually. You'd sell one in January and it'd be in for repairs in February. Wilford Harris—he was about twenty—was the son of a Salem auto mechanic. His father taught him how to fix things. He'd been in the army—Vietnam—and they'd had him fixing mechanical and electrical stuff, so that added to his knowledge. He was good at it. But you couldn't trust the sonofabitch as far as you could throw him."

  * * * *

  "After all these years?” said Martin Snively. A stocky man, he had a narrow, hawklike face, and a long slender nose that hung over a perpetually frowning mouth. He wore a cardigan sweater with slacks and moccasins. “Why wasn't it found forty years ago?"

  "Apparently nobody looked where they needed to look,” said Chamberlain. “And then it sank into the sand. Tangle Beach is treacherous."

  "That's true. Like quicksand when wet, like the Sahara when dry. I've been off Tangle but never approached it. I have a twenty-two-foot cabin cruiser myself, although of course not back then. No area on the Oregon coast is as dangerous when the waves are heavy."

  They were sitting in the big living room of Snively's ultra-modern, 4,000-square-foot bungalow mansion overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Chamberlain had noticed Snively's 2009 Lexus next to his wife's red 2007 Nissan. Like Larson, Snively had prospered, investing his money from the sale of FRLS Video into real estate.

  "But why are you notifying me?” asked Snively. “I had no blood relationship to either of them. Archie was my friend and business partner, but I hardly knew Melissa."

  "I'm not only notifying you; I'm here to question you. Randall's skull had a bullet hole in it, and Melissa Fenwick appears to have been shot in the chest and stomach. There were spent rounds amid her bones and chips on the breastplate."

  Snively's mouth had dropped open, his face paled.

  "But how?” he asked. “Who could've murdered them? They went out alone, just the two of them. Was it a murder-suicide?"

  "No. We found no gun. Whoever killed them took it with him when he left or tossed it overboard. A third person had to have been aboard. Did you see the Fayina leave Oldport?"

  "No. I stayed home all day, drinking beer and watching TV. I'd taken that Friday off. Norm and a couple of employees were the only people at the office. As I remember—and I have a good memory about it because of what happened—they did about ten dollars’ worth of business that day."

  "Can anybody confirm that you were home?"

  "Forty years ago? No way. In fact, I think Sheriff Axtell asked all of us about our routines that day. I think that's why I remember so well what I was doing. I don't remember if he asked me about an alibi. We weren't thinking murder. We thought the boat went down in a storm."

  Chamberlain asked him about his relations with the victims. He said that he'd gotten along well with Randall, though the man was “full of him
self,” and had no relations with Melissa at any time. She'd been Larson's girlfriend, had split up with him, and married Fenwick on the rebound. But then she'd become dissatisfied and had gone after Randall while Larson began making plays for her.

  "Wait a minute,” said Chamberlain. “Curtis Larson was pursuing Melissa, not the other way around?"

  "I think she was flirting with both of them. I know they were both interested in her. She was a pretty girl, a beautiful girl. But that was stupid of them, messing around with the wife of a partner. I wouldn't of done it, if she'd tried to flirt with me. She never did. Archie and Curtis were the good-lookers in our group, not me or Norm."

  "Wasn't Larson engaged to his future wife about that time?” Larson had told him so.

  Snively shook his head. “They got married soon afterward, but they weren't engaged yet. I think Melissa's death sort of paved the way for Karen. I think Curtis was holding back from marrying her, keeping his options open, hoping to win back Melissa if she divorced Norm. But after Melissa disappeared, he decided to settle for Karen Taylor. I don't think he ever loved her the way he'd loved Melissa. That—what?—that spark, wasn't there. I never saw him look at her the same adoring way. Of course, they had a couple of kids together and didn't divorce until about a decade ago. Curtis, Junior, is now a Seattle lawyer, and Larissa married a Willamette Valley vintner."

  "How long before he remarried?"

  "That was why he divorced Karen: to marry Anna Udall, who was about thirty. Married her immediately. Of course, his third wife, Tiffany, was a couple years younger than her, and he married her several years later."

  Snively continued to talk, almost in a gossipy tone, about the later wives and how the sixty-three-year-old Larson now had a five-year-old son.

  "Do you remember,” asked Chamberlain, “who worked for your company in March nineteen sixty-nine?"

  "Vaguely. We had a couple of young guys and a middle-aged fellow. Vance Ramsey was just out of high school, a really bright kid. Willard Harris was a Vietnam vet. The middle-aged guy was Paul Kauffman. He was with us for years."

  "Willard or Wilford Harris?"

  "I think Willard. . . . Well, no, I think you're right: Wilford. Curtis would know for sure. He fired him for stealing."