Huckleberry Finished (14 page)

I
had finally succeeded in taking him completely by surprise. His jaw practically dropped. He was too much in control of his emotions to let his reaction go quite that far, though. It didn't last long, either. A second after the words were out of my mouth, his face was once again carefully expressionless.

“I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

I put a hand in the middle of his chest and pushed him backward into his room. Of course, he was a lot bigger than me and I probably couldn't have budged him if he hadn't let me, but he didn't put up a fight. He probably wanted to find out just how much I actually knew.

“Forget it,” I told him as I closed the door behind me. “Louise Kramer told me the whole thing. I know about her daughter and about the two of you bein' old friends. I even know that you're a private eye.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “Let me tell you, that's better than what I was thinkin' when Louise tried to sneak into your cabin last night and then I saw her comin' out of here earlier and you hugged her like the two of you had just climbed out of the sack.”

“Delilah!”

“Oh, don't act so shocked. Aren't all private eyes sophisticated men of the world?”

Mark shook his head. “You've got it all wrong. There's nothing going on between Louise and me.”

“Didn't I just say that? I know that y'all are just friends. And that she's your client.”

“You say that she came here last night? You saw her and talked to her then? Why didn't you say anything?”

“No, I didn't talk to her. Until this morning, I didn't know who the woman was who let herself into your cabin with a key and called your name in the wee hours of the mornin'. What the heck was I supposed to think?”

He looked confused. After a second he said, “If I had a girlfriend coming to my cabin last night, would I have offered the place to you like I did?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Maybe you had some serious foolin' around in mind.”

He held up his hands, palms out, and said, “Delilah, I swear—”

“Oh, relax,” I told him. “I know now what's goin' on, remember? Louise explained the whole thing to me. I'm not mad at you for havin' a girlfriend.” I snorted. Unladylike, I know, but that was the only way to express what I was feeling just then. “Anyway, even if you had a girlfriend, it wouldn't be any of my business, now would it?”

He didn't answer that. Instead he asked, “What did Louise tell you?”

I laid it all out for him, just like she had with me in the dining room. Somehow while we were talking, we wound up sitting down, me in the room's only chair, Mark on the edge of the bed. When I was finished telling him what Louise had told me, I said, “What about it? Have you found out anything about Hannah Kramer's murder?”

The question made him look uncomfortable. “That's really between me and my client, isn't it?”

“It would be if Detective Travis wasn't trying to find some connection between Hannah's murder and what happened to Ben Webster yesterday.”

“But there's not any connection,” Mark said. He rubbed his jaw in thought. “I've looked into the time that Hannah lived in St. Louis, after she left Kennett. She didn't know anybody named Webster there.”

“You've found out the names of everybody she knew?”

“Well, no, I suppose not. That would be pretty difficult. People have lots of acquaintances who don't play any major part in their lives.”

“Louise said that Hannah got involved with a man in St. Louis. Do you know his name?”

Mark frowned. “I haven't been able to find out who he was yet. She didn't really confide in her neighbors in the apartment house or anything like that.”

“So you don't know. She might have been dating Ben Webster. She could have dumped him, and he could have come on the riverboat to either win her back…or kill her.”

Except for the fact that Ben Webster wasn't really his name, I reminded myself. The dead man's true identity was still a mystery. So even if Mark had been able to find out who Hannah's boyfriend was, he probably wouldn't have been going by Ben Webster.

“That doesn't make sense,” Mark said. “Webster's dead, too. If he killed Hannah—and I think that's really unlikely—then who killed him?”

Eddie Kramer, maybe, I thought. But if Mark didn't know whether or not Webster had been Hannah's boyfriend, then how in the heck could Eddie have found out?

My head was starting to hurt from trying to keep up with all this.

I had something to trade, I told myself. I might not know who the latest murder victim really was, but I knew who he wasn't. Maybe that was tied in with the case Mark was working on. Maybe it wasn't. But the best way to start finding out was for both of us to lay our cards on the table.

“Why don't you tell me everything you've been able to find out about Hannah?” I suggested. “And I'll tell you what I know about Ben Webster.”

“Webster's got nothing to do with this.”

“How do you
know
that?”

He thought about that for a second, then slowly nodded. “All right. You've got a point there. But you probably know most of this already.”

“Tell me anyway,” I said, realizing that I was starting to sound like Detective Travis. Maybe if the literary tour business went bust, I could start a new career as a cop.

That
was a laugh.

“Louise told you that her mom and my mom are best friends, I imagine.”

I nodded. “She did.”

“If you ever lived in a small town, you know how strong the grapevine is. Everybody keeps up with everybody else's business, even when somebody moves away. So Louise knew that I was a detective.”

“Not a lawyer,” I said with an accusatory tone in my voice.

Mark spread his hands and gave me a rueful smile. “I know, I lied to you. I'm sorry. I'm working undercover, though. You can't expect me to just blurt out who I really am and what I'm doing to everybody I meet…even really good-looking redheads.”

“Flattery's not necessary. Don't think that means I don't appreciate it, but it's not necessary.”

“I actually do a lot of work for various law firms, so while I may not be a lawyer, I work for them most of the time. I don't take on many cases for individual clients like Louise. I wouldn't have taken this one if she hadn't been an old friend.”

“Why not?”

“A murder that's a year old?” He shook his head. “That's a pretty cold case. Plus, when you start digging around in people's lives, you never know what you're going to find out. I might have uncovered something about Hannah that Louise would have rather not known. I still might.”

“Like who her boyfriend in St. Louis was?”

“Yeah.” He paused. “Or who the father of her child was, if it's not the same guy.”

I couldn't help but stare at him. “Child?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Hannah Kramer was pregnant when she died.”

That was a shocker, although in this day and age, when it seems like more unmarried women are pregnant than the ones with wedding rings on their fingers, I don't know why it should have been.

“Did her folks know about that?”

“Sure. The autopsy turned up the fact that she was three months pregnant, and of course the police questioned Louise and Eddie about it. They wanted to know who the father was, since he'd automatically be a suspect in the murder, at least until it was established whether or not he had an alibi. But Louise and Eddie didn't know anything about it, except that Hannah had been seeing somebody. And Louise was the only one who actually knew that. Hannah and her father didn't talk much after the big blowup they had that resulted in her moving away from home.”

“Nobody who knew Hannah in St. Louis had any idea?”

“Evidently she kept pretty much to herself,” Mark said. “She was a shy girl. Not really the sort to work as a cocktail waitress in a riverboat casino, although she was pretty enough to do so. Nobody here on board the
Southern Belle
had any complaints about her work, other than the fact that she was sick fairly often.”

“Morning sickness,” I said.

“Yeah, that's my guess.”

Hannah's pregnancy added another whole layer to the mystery of her death. Not only was the identity of the baby's father unknown, but so was whether or not the pregnancy had any connection to her death.

A picture was starting to form in my mind. It was fuzzy, but still a picture. If Ben Webster had been Hannah's boyfriend, if he was the father of her baby, he could have come on board the riverboat now in an attempt to track down her killer and avenge her death. While it was unlikely he would be able to solve her murder in less than a day when the police had been unsuccessful for a whole year, that possibility couldn't be ruled out. Maybe Webster figured out who the killer was, confronted him, and then whoever it was had committed a second murder to keep from being exposed. As far as I could see, the theory hung together—but it was just a theory, with lots of blank spaces in it where information still needed to be filled in.

I looked at Mark and wondered if the same idea had occurred to him. I had to ask myself if I trusted him enough to share it with him. He had come clean with me, but only when I had already found out most of what was going on myself and he'd been forced to.

He didn't know about Webster not being Webster, either. I had promised him I'd be honest with him if he was honest with me, so I didn't see any way out of telling him what I knew.

Before I did, though, there were still a couple of things I wanted to know from him. “What have you been doing since I saw Louise come out of your cabin earlier? I looked around the boat for you but couldn't find you.”

“I was down below decks talking to some of the engine room crew. They wouldn't have had that much to do with Hannah while she was working on the boat, but I'm running out of people to ask about her.”

“Don't they wonder why the guy who plays Mark Twain is asking so many questions?”

“Please,” Mark said. “I don't just come right out and say, ‘Remember that girl who was murdered last year? Who do you think might have killed her?' Give me credit for a little more subtlety than that.”

“Did you find out anything?”

He shook his head. “Not a blasted thing. Actually, all they wanted to talk about was Ben Webster's murder.”

“They have any ideas about that?”

“I'm afraid not. Henry, the guy who found the body, is still pretty shaken up about it.”

“That corridor where the storage locker is…it doesn't have a security camera covering it, does it?”

Mark laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “The cops can't be that lucky. There's no camera. The killer wasn't caught on tape stuffing Webster's body into the locker.”

“Is that corridor used very much?”

“Actually, no. It's not the main access to the engine room. Nothing's down there but the little closet where Webster's body was found and some hatches that give access to the pipes running between the boilers and the engine room.”

“You think whoever hid Webster's body there knew that?” I asked. “Seems to me that if they did, they must know a lot about the boat and how it operates.”

He nodded slowly. “That's a good thought. Somebody could have carried the body down there on the spur of the moment and stashed it the first place they came to—”

“But it's more likely they went down there with Webster and killed him right then and there,” I said, even as the conclusion formed in my mind.

“Yeah,” Mark said. “That would be a lot less risky than hauling a corpse down from one of the upper decks.”

“That would mean it's pretty likely Webster knew his killer, and maybe even trusted him,” I pointed out.

Mark shrugged. “Or had some other good reason to go with him, like a gun in his back.”

“Forcing Webster below decks at gunpoint seems almost as risky to me as killing him up above and then carryin' him down.”

“That's true,” Mark admitted. “This is interesting speculation, Delilah, but that's all it is. And it doesn't have anything to do with Hannah Kramer's murder, at least as far as we know now.”

“Maybe,” I said with a note of stubbornness in my voice. “I know coincidences exist in this world, but it seems like a real stretch to me to think that two people could be killed on the same riverboat, almost exactly a year apart, and the two cases not have
some
connection.”

He grinned. “Maybe you should be a private detective.”

I snorted again. “No, thank you. I'm perfectly happy doin' what I'm doin'…. At least I am when nobody gets themselves murdered on one of my tours!”

M
ark had told me all he knew, or at least he claimed he had. All I could do was take his word for it. But I didn't think he was lying, so I knew it was time for me to keep my part of the bargain.

“Even though we don't know for sure that Ben Webster's murder is connected to Hannah's,” I said, “I found out something about Webster that might interest you.”

“I'm all ears,” he said.

Actually, his ears weren't abnormally big. They were just the right size for his head. But I pushed that distracting thought out of my brain and went on, “My daughter, Melissa, did some diggin' around on the computer about Webster, and she discovered that he was usin' a phony name.”

Mark frowned in surprise and asked, “He wasn't really Ben Webster?”

“Nope. The credit card he used to pay for this trip was legit, but the billing address on it doesn't exist. The info he gave us doesn't match up with any of the Ben Websters in the Social Security database, either. It was a false identity, or a stolen one.”

Mark rubbed his jaw again as he thought over what I'd just told him. “Then he must have been some sort of criminal,” he said slowly.

“You'd think so.” Another possibility occurred to me. “Either that, or he was hiding out from somebody.”

“And they caught up to him and killed him?”

I shrugged. “That would explain the murder.
That
murder, anyway. I don't see how it ties in with Hannah's.”

Mark smiled. “After you think about all the possibilities for a while, it makes you want to tear your hair out, doesn't it?”

“My head already hurts bad enough without tearin' any hair out.”

We likely would have hashed things out some more—and probably not reached any conclusions—but right then Mark's cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, looked at the display, and frowned.

“Winston, Pine, and Blevins,” he said. “That's a law firm in St. Louis I do most of my work for. I guess I'd better take this.”

“Go ahead,” I told him.

He opened the phone, said, “Hello.” With a frown of concentration on his face, he listened for a minute, then said, “That's a very appealing offer, Mr. Pine, but I'm already involved in a case right now…How much?…And the client asked for me in particular?…How did they know?…I see. When do you need an answer?” His mouth tightened. “I don't see how I can…Yes, sir, I understand…I'm sorry. I just can't do it.” He took a deep breath. “Of course. Good-bye.”

Then he looked at me as he closed the phone and added, “Well, that sucks.”

“What happened?”

“One of the firm's biggest clients wanted them to hire me to do some investigative work. And the job would start immediately, as in today, as soon as I could get back to St. Louis.”

“How come you didn't tell them you're stuck in Hannibal until Detective Travis decides to let us go?”

Mark shook his head. “It wouldn't matter. Even if we weren't being held here, I gave Louise my word. I can't just drop one case to take on another one, no matter how lucrative it might be…or how detrimental it's going to be to turn down the job.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Mr. Pine—the partner I was talking to—made it clear that if I didn't accept the offer, I wouldn't be getting any more assignments from Winston, Pine, and Blevins in the future.” He shrugged. “And like I said, I did more work for them than any other law firm.”

“That's terrible,” I said. “And not fair at all.”

He shrugged. “Nobody ever said life was fair, now did they?”

“If they did, they were dead wrong,” I agreed. “Still, this just isn't right.”

More than that, I found it odd. Something stirred in the back of my mind, but I couldn't drag it far enough into the light to make out what it was. All I could sense was a connection I wasn't quite seeing.

“Right or not,” Mark said, “I'll stick with Louise's case. If she doesn't find out what happened to Hannah, it's going to haunt her for the rest of her life. And that
really
wouldn't be fair.”

“You're right. What do we do now?”

He raised his eyebrows. “We?”

“Consider me your assistant,” I said. “Watson to your Holmes.”

Mark laughed. “You're giving me
way
too much credit for my deductive abilities. I'm a plodder, not an eccentric genius. Besides, I play Mark Twain, not Sherlock Holmes, remember?”

“Well, Twain wrote a book called
Tom Sawyer, Detective
, didn't he?”

“He did,” Mark admitted with a shrug.

“If it's good enough for Tom Sawyer, it's good enough for us. I'll be Becky Thatcher.”

He laughed again. “I'm not sure she's in that book, but all right. I can see you're not going to give up. What do we do next?”

“I can't shake the feeling that there might be a connection between Hannah's murder and what happened to the fella callin' himself Ben Webster. Have you been on board long enough to know who runs the roulette wheel in the casino?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.”

“Let's go see if we can find him and have a talk with him,” I said.

 

With the casino closed, all the people who normally worked there didn't have anything to do. And with the salon being used by Detective Travis to conduct her questioning of everybody on the
Southern Belle
, the crew members couldn't go there to drink. Mark had heard rumors, though, that there was a party going on below decks for the duration of the riverboat's enforced stay in Hannibal.

We headed down the four flights of stairs that took us to the boat's lower level. There was a mess hall for the crew down there, Mark explained, so the people who worked on the
Southern Belle
didn't have to eat in the same dining room as the passengers. We heard the sound of talk and laughter before we even got there.

When we reached the mess hall, we found it crowded. Even though the sun wasn't anywhere near the yardarm, to use a nautical term that didn't have anything to do with riverboats, I saw quite a bit of drinking going on, as well as a poker game where a couple of tables had been pushed together. I wondered what poker was like for a bunch of professional dealers. Sort of a busman's holiday, I expected, but what else did they have to do while they were stuck here?

Several people greeted Mark with reserved smiles. He was the new guy on board, after all. They glanced somewhat suspiciously at me. I was a passenger. To their way of thinking, I didn't belong down here.

But as the leader of a tour group, I wasn't a regular passenger. It could be argued that I worked on the
Southern Belle
, the same as the rest of the folks gathered in this mess hall did.

As we crossed the room, I could tell that there was a considerable amount of flirting going on among the crew, too. You throw a bunch of men and women together in a work environment and there are bound to be some romances, no matter how many rules there are against them. Some things you just can't legislate or regulate, and the effect of hormones is one of 'em. Don't let anybody tell you it only happens among younger folks, either. Listen to the gossip in retirement homes, if you don't believe me.

That might have something to do with Hannah Kramer's murder, I told myself. She could have gotten involved with someone who worked on the riverboat, and her death could have been the result of a lover's quarrel.

But that wasn't true of Ben Webster. He had been on board for only a few hours before he was killed. He hadn't had time to start any sort of romance with either another passenger or a member of the crew. And we were here to poke into Webster's murder right now, in hopes that investigating it might lead to something that would have a bearing on Hannah's death, too.

Mark led me to a table in the corner where a man sat alone. “Hello, Garvey,” he said. “You know Delilah Dickinson, don't you?”

The man wore a sullen expression on his face as he shook his head. He had a half-empty beer bottle on the table in front of him, the fingers of one hand wrapped loosely around it.

“Can't say as I do,” he said. “One of the passengers, isn't she?”

I thought that was sort of rude, talking about me like I wasn't even there. So I said, “No, not exactly. I'm the leader of one of the tour groups.”

The man called Garvey grunted. “Same thing.”

I felt a surge of anger but didn't show it. “No, this is my job,” I said with a smile. “I work on the boat, just like you do. Mind if we sit down?”

He nodded toward the empty chairs at the table. “Help yourselves.”

We sat down, and Mark said, “This is a pretty rotten deal, isn't it, being stuck here like this? I don't know about you, but I need to get back to St. Louis.”

Garvey shrugged. “It doesn't matter all that much to me. I don't have any family there. And I get paid either way, whether we're steaming back down the river or not.”

“Yeah, but I don't like the way the cops are questioning everybody, like we're suspects or something,” Mark said.

“Huh,” Garvey said. “You don't have anything to worry about. I'm the one who had trouble yesterday with that son of a bitch who got killed.” He glanced at me. “No offense. I know he was one of your clients.”

I leaned forward over the table and said, “Did that lady cop question you already? She was all over me earlier, just because Webster was a member of my tour. I never even saw the guy before lunch yesterday! Why would I have any reason to kill him?”

“Of course you wouldn't,” Garvey agreed. “He didn't take a swing at you.” He drank from his beer and added hastily, “Don't take that to mean I had anything to do with what happened to him. I was working in the casino all afternoon yesterday and never left it. I've got witnesses to prove that, and that's what I told that cop.” A humorless chuckle came from him. “Anyway, it's not like that was the first time anybody ever accused me of running a crooked wheel. Hell, I ought to be used to it by now. I've had customers threaten me before.”

“Really?” Mark said.

“You've always got sore losers to deal with. That's just part of the job.” A cynical grin appeared on Garvey's narrow face. “Of course, there might be a few more than usual on the
Southern Belle
.”

Before either of us could ask him what he meant by that, a large presence loomed up beside us. I turned my head to see Logan Rafferty standing there. “What are you going on about now, Clyde?” he asked Garvey.

“Nothing, Mr. Rafferty, nothing,” Garvey said. He almost tripped over the words, and I could tell he was nervous. Rafferty had that effect on people, especially when he was towering over them like a mountain about to come crashing down on them.

Rafferty looked at me and frowned. “What are you doing here, Ms. Dickinson? Not that you're not welcome, but this is a crew area. It's normally off limits to passengers.”

“I brought her with me,” Mark said. “I figured Delilah's not exactly the same as a regular passenger, since being on the boat is part of her job, just like it is with ours.”

Rafferty's massive shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “I suppose you could look at it that way,” he said. “I wouldn't go wandering around by yourself in places you're not supposed to be, though, Ms. Dickinson.”

“I don't intend to,” I told him. “And I can go back up on deck right now if you want.”

He waved a big hand. “No, no, that's all right. You're welcome down here.” He turned back to Garvey. “I need to have a word with you in private, Clyde.”

A small, nervous tic in Garvey's jaw increased in its frequency. But he nodded and said, “All right, sure.”

“Let's go up to my office,” Rafferty suggested as Garvey stood up.

Garvey looked a little like a man being marched to the gallows as he left the mess hall with Rafferty. When they were gone, Mark leaned toward me and asked in a quiet voice, “What do you think that was all about?”

“This is just a guess,” I said, “but I'll bet Rafferty wants to find out what Detective Travis asked Garvey about that trouble with Ben Webster yesterday…and what Garvey told her.”

Mark nodded as he thought about it, then said, “You know, from the way Garvey was talking, it's not unusual for people to complain about the roulette wheel. Do you think that's because it really is rigged?”

“You mean Webster was right about bein' cheated?” I shook my head. “I don't know. I'd think that the boat makes plenty of money without riggin' the games, but short of takin' a look at the books, I don't know how we'd ever prove that.”

“For some people, there's no such thing as plenty of money,” Mark pointed out. “They always want more and more, no matter how much they've got.”

“That's true.” I thought about it, then said, “And just because the
boat
makes money, that doesn't mean everything in the casino is on the up-and-up. The profits from the
Southern Belle
go in Charles Gallister's pocket. Maybe if there's something funny going on in the casino, it's somebody else's operation.”

“Like Logan Rafferty's?”

We looked at each other and shook our heads at the same time. “We're jumping to way too many conclusions,” Mark went on.

“Maybe, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're wrong,” I pointed out. “It's something to think about.”

Instinctively, I had disliked and distrusted Logan Rafferty from the moment I met him. I could easily see him setting up some sort of crooked scheme in the casino involving a rigged roulette wheel. Maybe after giving me the slip the day before, Ben Webster had continued poking around until he found the proof he needed to show everybody that he'd been right about being cheated. If Rafferty was behind it, then he'd have had a good reason to break Webster's neck.