Death Was the Other Woman (20 page)

THE FAMILY
was large and complicated. I could see a husband and wife, three children, and perhaps six servants. One of the children—a boy of maybe three or four—cried incessantly, an intensely loud cry that seemed designed to pierce the calm of even the bravest of sailors. The men nearby shuddered as the wails rent the air.

There was some confusion with the party's ticketing. The father bellowed at the man in charge. “Do you know who I am?” he said three or four times. The officer obviously did not, because it didn't seem to ease their progress. Perhaps, I thought from my safe distance, it even made things worse.

The woman—I took her to be the bellowing man's wife— kept clasping and unclasping her hands, looking as though she might say something, then holding back. The servants shuffled madly this way and that; one young woman in particular looked nervous about the whole venture and was already turning slightly green. And the child wailed on.

I slipped my hat off my head and pushed it into my handbag so I might be more easily taken as a servant. Then I joined the group as quietly as possible, just as the uniformed officer indicated they should go on aboard. Everything would be sorted out later, he assured them. I got the feeling he would have done anything to get the noisy kid out of earshot, and in any case, the group had been holding up the line.

One of the servants seemed to notice me join the group. She met my eyes and looked at me oddly. I thought for a second she was going to say something; then she seemed to change her mind, and she looked away. Bellowing employers don't do much to inspire loyalty in those who work for them.

I stuck with the group until we were deep inside the vessel. At the earliest opportunity I went left when they went right, ducking into yet another powder room to catch my breath, fix my hair, and replace my hat. The small glimpse I'd already had of the ship told me one thing: the
City of Los Angeles
was huge. I'd have my work cut out for me finding anything at all.

I'd taken perhaps six tentative steps away from the washroom when an employee of the line stopped me. Feeling guilty as I did, I was sure he was about to give me the bum's rush, but he smiled pleasantly and asked if he could be of assistance.

“Do I look that lost?” I asked, pleased that my voice came out sounding controlled when I didn't feel that way at all.

“I'm afraid you do,” he said, nodding kindly. Under his peaked cap, he had an open face and kind blue eyes. “Getting lost is an easy enough thing to do on this ship, miss. I spent my first few weeks aboard just trying to find my way around.”

“You did? Well, I'll try not to feel so silly then.”

“What deck are you on?” he asked.

I looked around for a hint. “I'm afraid I haven't a clue. Don't
you
know?”

He looked at me blankly for a moment, then burst out laughing. “No, no. You're on C deck now, of course. I meant, on which deck is your stateroom?”

It was my turn to look blank. I really had no idea of what to say, which is what in the end I decided to tell him. “That's the problem, you see. I don't remember. Is there any way . . . that is ... can you help me?”

“Yes, of course I can. Come with me.” He led me back the way I'd come when I'd slunk past with the noisy family. He stopped at the purser's desk.

“I'm afraid this young lady is quite lost,” my new friend said to the man behind the desk. “Oh, ho,” he said warmly, smiling at me. “Is she now?” I had the feeling this happened a lot. “You don't remember at all?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then, what's your name?”

Any second's hesitation was a hesitation too long. Yet I had to hesitate. I had to process quickly who I should be and where I wanted to be sent. I reasoned that the receipt I'd seen was for John Harrison and Mrs. John Harrison. I decided I looked more like Mrs. than John.

“Mrs. John Harrison,” I said into the void. I told myself it had only
seemed
like long minutes had passed. In fact, it could only have been a few fat seconds.

“Harrison . . . Harrison. Let me see ...” he said, running his index finger over the passenger list. “Here we are. You said John Harrison?”

I nodded.

“Good. Only Harrison this sailing, in any case. Right then, you're in one of the suites deluxe.” He looked me over again, perhaps checking for signs of affluence he'd missed on the first take. There weren't any, so he went on. “Those rooms are all on the highest level, which makes them quite easy to find. Gill here can show you the way.”

“If you'd just direct me,” I said quickly, “I'd prefer to find my own way.” Poor Gill looked somewhat crushed, so I hastened to add, “I've taken more than enough of his time already. And in any case, I think I'd like to look around before I go back up.”

The two of them gave me careful directions, the purser adding to them with a small but well-crafted diagram. I assured them I wouldn't get lost and headed on my way.

The ship seemed immense to me. And immaculate. The pristine woodwork was carefully painted, beautifully maintained. Polished floors flowed underfoot, and everywhere you looked, the brasswork gleamed like so much spun gold.

I knew that at another time I would have delighted in exploring the craft—following the stairways, trying the food that was already being laid out. The ship was a wonder to me. A small, self-contained city preparing to make a journey to a different realm.

At the same time that my imagination told stories about this seagoing magic carpet, it tried to tell me others about the people I passed in the broad corridors. There, that stout woman. She was no doubt a dowager duchess abroad, looking for an unsuspecting king. That woman there? She must be a silent screen actress, left jobless because she didn't have a voice anyone wanted to hear. That tragic man there, with the dark eyes? He was a widower, of course. He had undertaken the journey in the hope of finding a new wife, one who could be mother to his children. The little girl in a pinafore. What disappointments lay in her future? And here I stopped myself. The game was becoming too dark.

Even with good directions, it took a while for me to find what I sought. That was just as well because I used the time to try to think about what I was going to do. By the time I reached the stateroom door, I'd come to no conclusions, and before I even knew what I was doing, my arm snaked out and I gave the door a firm knock.

THE EXPRESSION
on Rita Heppelwaite's face when she pulled the door open told me she'd expected a more pleasant surprise. As it was, her eyes went all wide when she got a load of me. She stood there for a second or two just looking at me, perhaps trying to figure out where in her memories I fit. For her, I was out of place.

It didn't take long for her to figure out what part of her memory I belonged in though. I saw the recognition dawn on her face, and in almost the same moment she reached out with one gloved hand, fastened it on my wrist, and dragged me into the stateroom. She was stronger than she looked; I figured I'd have a bruise the next day where her hand had grabbed me. If I lived to bruise, that is. That wasn't a forgone conclusion at that moment.

As she closed the door behind us, I realized there was a third person in the cabin. Now it was my turn to shuffle through recent memories. I knew that I knew him, but his appearance was so altered by his grooming and clothing, I didn't recognize him at first. He was dressed in a good suit, a well-made fedora tilted at just the right angle on his handsome head. It was Calvin, Brucie's brother, considerably altered out of his country-boy clothes. And though I was certain he recognized me, he played as though he had not.

“What's goin' on?” he said.

“You know that shamus? Dex Theroux?” Rita asked. Calvin nodded. “This is his secretary.”

“His secretary,” the guy said. He made his voice show the shock Rita would have expected, but he wasn't so shocked that he couldn't reach under his jacket and pull his hand out with a roscoe inside. A big roscoe too. Big enough to put a hole or six into me without too much trouble.

Up close and personal like this, I realized I had made at least one mistake. It made sense to me that since Cal was here with Rita, Rita probably didn't know anything about Brucie. Cal would want to keep it that way, making the danger to me very real. Everyone knows there's only one real way to silence someone. I tried to swallow, but my throat had closed up. My heart was up to some odd shenanigans too.

And in between the attempts at swallowing and trying to get my pulse under control, I realized I'd made another miscalculation: whatever game was being played here, there were very few points that I'd gotten right. And I'd gotten enough of it wrong to put me in grave danger.

“I thought you told me that mook hadn't gotten wise,” Cal said.

“He didn't. I'm sure he didn't.”

“What's
she
doin' here then?” He waved his gun at me most disconcertingly as he said this, the motion oddly like deja vu. I forced the swallow I'd been working on, but didn't say anything.

“I don't know, Cal. I just don't know.” She looked honestly perplexed.

“We'll have to croak her.” It wasn't a question. He looked a challenge at me. I wasn't sure he was smart, but he was wily, like a fox with distemper. However this went down, he was holding the gun. In this particular game of poker, Cal was the one who held the best hand.

Rita Heppelwaite nodded, as though he'd said they'd have to plant roses or buy a new car. “We will,” she agreed. “But not now. The gun would make too much noise. We'll wait until tonight. We'll be under power, and we can get rid of the body then too.”

The mook nodded his understanding. “Good thinking. We'll just take her outside, croak her, then slip her into the drink.”

There were things I could have been saying at this point. Things I
should
have been saying. Things that would help my situation, perhaps ease my plight. I'm quick with the tongue. I always have been. Too quick sometimes, if my teachers at school were to be believed. Yet in that instant, in the confines of the stateroom deluxe, with Rita Heppelwaite's beautiful eyes on me and Cal's secrets and his impatient-looking gun, I couldn't make myself say boo, let alone the clever, witty, and persuasive things I knew myself capable of dreaming up. I just stood there and watched them, feeling like a deer caught in headlights. The forest was near—so near—yet I hadn't the courage or the wherewithal to make a single move.

Just as I figured I'd be pushing up daisies in no time flat, there was a ruckus at the cabin door. The knock came triple time—and hard. I saw Cal's and Rita's eyes meet over my head, but neither of them made a move. Then both sets of eyes went to the doorknob as it turned. The door opened, and Harrison Dempsey burst into the room without so much as a how-do-you-do. And this time I
knew
it was Harrison Dempsey. It was in the way he stood there, his legs spread just slightly apart, like they were his roots and he was an oak. And it was in the way he looked at the three of us, sizing up the situation as though seeing where he fit. Where we all did.

He was about the same build and coloring as the man we'd found in the bathtub on Lafayette Square, and the features were not dissimilar, but there was something about the set of his face that spoke volumes about the glimpses of the life Dex and I had gotten over the past few days. And maybe a whiff of something that came off him; the smell of success and corruption in his own special blend.

Dempsey stood in the doorway for a long moment, drinking in the scene. His eyes slid over me and looked coldly at Cal, but they stopped at Rita like they'd hit a wall.

“So this is how it is, huh?”

“Harry . . .” Rita's voice was as small and girlish as I'd ever heard it. “It's not what it looks like. It's not what you think.”

“And what do I think, Rita? That you double-crossed me? That you agreed to go away with me, then fed me to Lucid's torpedoes?”

“It's not like that Harry. . . .” Her voice was plaintive now.

“It was a nice setup, Rita. You get me to buy the tickets . . . get me to put up the dough for the trip ... for a life. Then you get rid of me so you can run off with
this
boob.”

“Hey!” Cal said, shifting the gun uncomfortably from one hand to the other and targeting first Dempsey, then me, then Dempsey again, as though he couldn't quite decide whose presence represented the biggest threat. I could have told him, but he didn't ask.

“Yeah, you heard me, you dumb palooka,” Dempsey went on. “Look at the broad you chose. Think about the game she's playing, chum. She doesn't care for you any more than she cared for me. First chance she gets, she'll throw you over for something better, because that's what her kind does.”

Now Cal seemed to have three people to watch carefully. Me, Dempsey, and Rita. Of the three, there's no doubt I seemed the least likely to try anything funny.

“We was ...” Cal cleared his throat, went on. “We was gonna go away together.”

“A lonely island in the Pacific, right?” Dempsey said. “Yeah, poor sap. We were gonna go there too, weren't we, sweetheart?” he said, addressing Rita again. “How much you get for me? Was it enough?”

“Fifteen G's,” Rita said quietly.

Dempsey whistled. “Not bad, not bad. With the fifteen I'd already given you to hang onto for the South Pacific, you were gonna be set up pretty good. You and pretty boy here,” he said, cocking his thumb at Cal. “Too bad those looks ain't brains or you'd be dangerous.”

“Hey!” Cal said again.

“You figured I'd take it lying down, Harry?” Now there was a white heat on Rita's face. She didn't look beautiful anymore. “You think I didn't know you were carrying on with that Jergens broad? I've got eyes, Harry.”

I flashed a look at Cal's face at the mention of Brucie's name. What I saw there was anything but brotherly. If I hadn't been sure before, I was now: no one in this room knew the whole game. Probably not even Cal.

“People talk,” Rita added.

“They talk too much,” Dempsey sniffed.

“She wanted what I had.” Rita seemed not to have heard Dempsey at all. “And when she tried to take it, I realized I wanted more. I wasn't gonna be
that
girl, Harry. I wasn't gonna be the girl you left behind because you found someone new.”

“So you . . . what? You cooked up this cockamaimy plan to go off with
him?
And with my lettuce? I don't think so, Rita. I don't think so at all.”

While Dempsey spoke, I could feel something like tension rise in the small room, or maybe it was just the heat from under his collar. It can't have felt good to come to understand how he'd been both duped and used. As he became aware of just how deep this treachery had gone, I could see the anger rise in Dempsey's face. I watched while a deadly light dawned, and though his expression never changed, the tension around him did. After a while I felt that if I reached out, I'd be able to touch it. And I'd get burned.

When with a flinch and a shrug a weapon seemed to appear in Dempsey's hand, I was almost not surprised. Or maybe I
was
surprised—that it had taken so long to happen. How much had either of this pair thought he would endure before he'd snap?

Dempsey pulled out the gun and aimed it levelly at Cal. Not to be outdone or undone, Rita reached into her handbag and brought out a tiny pearl-handled derringer. In another situation, that gun might have been laughable. In the confines of the tiny quarters, however, I figured she could make any one of us pretty good and dead.

I let my eyes slide over these characters one by one, situated now like some weird Mexican standoff. Cal with his roscoe trained on Dempsey. Dempsey with his gun aimed almost casually at Rita, while Rita stood pointing her little weapon with great care in Dempsey's general direction. The room felt like a powder keg. I didn't figure it would take much of a spark for it to go off.

“What I wanna know, doll,” Dempsey said to Rita, “is why? We had us a pretty good plan. If the P.I. would've seen what we meant for him to see ...”

“Yeah,” Rita retorted, bolder now.
“If.
If you weren't married. If your wife hadn't come back from her mother's in Pasadena sooner than expected so's we had to get the body out of the house. If you didn't have an eye for a pretty skirt. If the shamus hadn't got it into his fool head to go to Frisco, seeing the corpse and then fingerprintin' it. If, if,
if.
But the biggest if of all has nothing to do with fate or the universe, Harry. The biggest if of all was Lucid Wilson. It was stupid to try an' play him. He'd have found us sooner or later; then I'd have ended up dead too.” She finished on a wretched sigh, then raised her weapon. The other two raised theirs as well.

There was a shot. Maybe two. But I didn't hang around to see who fell. In the heat and the noise, I took the only break I figured I was going to get and headed out the cabin door, running like hell and screaming blue murder. I could have saved the screams, I guess. By the time I hit the corridor, uniformed sailors—or were they steamers? I wondered maniacally—were heading toward me. My friend Gill, from earlier in the day, was at the head of the line.

“What's going on?” he asked naturally enough, his pleasant face not so calm now.

I let them know all hell had broken loose in one of the staterooms and led the way back, though they hardly needed me; the smell of cordite was rich in the air.

By the time we got there, Harrison Dempsey was dead— really dead this time—shot through the chest, just as the body in the tub had been, the body Dex and I had found at Lafayette Square.

All of us could see the small but deadly popgun still smoking in Rita's hands. She looked at the tiny pearl handle with something like wonderment on her face. Perhaps she hadn't expected that the little gun was actually capable of a mortal wound. It was.

There was no sign of Cal, which didn't surprise me. He'd seemed like someone who would take care of himself first. Would he slink over the side and paddle the few feet back to shore? Or hide in some gangway and then sneak back off the boat when the coast was clear? Or, as I was increasingly suspecting, was Brucie holed up in a stateroom on this very ship, waiting for Cal to join her, perhaps with thirty large in hand?

Either way, I figured we'd seen the last of him. His type is catlike: they land on their feet until one day they finally hit the ground too hard. That's the thing about cat lives; they only get the nine.

“What did you do this time, kiddo?” At the sound of his voice, my heart filled with relief.

“Dex!” I said, wheeling around, pleased but not surprised to see he had Mustard in tow. “What are you doing here?”

“Your note, for one. Plus the fact that Lila Dempsey couldn't identify her husband's body.”

“Because he wasn't dead,” I said. “Elway told me when I called him this morning looking for you.”

“I take it she could identify him now?” Mustard said, indicating the fallen man through the stateroom doorway.

They didn't let us stand around much longer. A P.I. license will get you only so far. There wasn't room for the three of us in the tiny cabin, not with Dempsey's corpse taking up space and an ever-increasing stream of people trying to get into the room to either clean things up or figure things out. Besides, there suddenly didn't seem to be any reason to hang around.

It took us a while to find our way off the ship, but when we did we met O'Reilly and Houlahan coming up the gangplank.

“Hello, boys,” Dex said casually. “What are you two doing here?”

“A little bird downtown told us Harrison Dempsey was dead and on this tub,” O'Reilly said. “Considering the shenanigans this body has been gettin' up to, we figured we'd better get down here quick and check it out for ourselves. How many times can one man die?”

“It's Dempsey all right. This time it's Dempsey for sure. And when you two are finished here, you swing by my office. There's more of this tale I need to tell.”

I looked at Dex as we continued on our way, but he didn't say anything. Maybe he would have, but just as we were about to move away from the ship, I spotted another passenger coming down the gangplank. It was Rita Heppelwaite, being escorted by two uniformed officers. She was handcuffed and managing the gangplank only awkwardly, hindered by high heels and a fur coat that kept wanting to slip off her shoulders.