Murder, She Wrote: Panning For Murder: Panning For Murder (Murder She Wrote) (19 page)

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Authors: Jessica Fletcher

BOOK: Murder, She Wrote: Panning For Murder: Panning For Murder (Murder She Wrote)
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“Sounds perfect,” I said. “I’m suddenly hungry.”
 
 
The restaurant was attractive, with lots of knotty pine paneling and stained-glass windows, and the food was simple but fresh and attractively served. Over lunch, we filled Bill in on what we planned to do that afternoon—try to find the elusive Maurice Quarlé and meet with Trooper McQuesten.
 
 
“Kathy says she’d be more comfortable having you with us,” I said.
 
 
Kathy placed her hand on his arm. “Especially since you worked out in the gym this morning,” she said lightly.
 
 
“You make this Quarlé character sound like he’s dangerous,” Bill said.
 
 
“I’m sure he’s not,” I said, “but if it pleases Kathy, I’m all for you accompanying us.”
 
 
Before we left the restaurant, Bill asked, “Do you really think that the fellow who went over the side of the ship was following you, Mrs. Fletcher?”
 
 
“Yes, I do.”
 
 
“I wish I’d found him the day you slipped on the stairs.”
 
 
“It wouldn’t have made any difference, I’m sure,” I said. “I’m hopeful that Trooper McQuesten will have the answers to some of my questions.”
 
 
We walked from the restaurant to the base of the tramway.
 
 
“That’s a long way up,” Kathy said.
 
 
“Eighteen hundred feet,” Bill said. “At least that’s what I read.”
 
 
“We could walk up there,” Kathy said, not sounding as though she meant it.
 
 
“Not this lady,” I said. “I love exercise, but this is too daunting. Come on. We’ll take a ride. My treat.”
 
 
We went to where tickets were being sold.
 
 
“Sure you don’t want us to chip in?” Bill asked after seeing the sign on which the prices were listed. It was twenty-four dollars for each adult.
 
 
“Since I’m the one who doesn’t want to walk, I think it only right that I pay. Besides, you bought lunch.”
 
 
I paid the fare, and we climbed into the small car that would carry us to the top. We were joined by other tourists, and when every available seat was taken, the tram started its slow, undulating trip up to the top of Mount Roberts. The higher we climbed, the more spectacular the views. Juneau is a visual feast. It’s shoe-horned in between Mount Juneau and Mount Roberts, with the Gastineau Channel hemming it in from anotherdirection. The mountains were snowcapped, as they are throughout the year. The channel and the pier, which became smaller and smaller as we ascended, were beehives of activity, with hundreds of tourists coming and going from their respective steamships, and dozens of smaller boats crisscrossing the channel. While everything below us diminished in size, the air became markedly colder, and I was glad I had dressed sensibly. Kathy also had on layered clothing and seemed comfortable. Bill, however, was dressed as though we were in the Bahamas. He wore a lightweight white shirt with long, billowing sleeves, a pair of chino pants, and sneakers sans socks.
 
 
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked him when we were almost to the top.
 
 
He laughed and raised his arms to the sky. “Cold? Not at all. I must be warm-blooded.”
 
 
Kathy laughed along with him. “You wouldn’t say that in the winter back where we live, in Cabot Cove, Maine,” she said.
 
 
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “I just may visit you there and prove you wrong.”
 
 
We stuttered to a stop at the top of the tram, and everyone exited the car.
 
 
“What a view,” Bill said.
 
 
He was right. The vista from that vantage point was spectacular. But I was focusing on the hodgepodge of tiny houses that seemed to have been built haphazardly, many of them clinging to the side of the mountain. They were painted in a variety of colors, blues and greens, reds and yellows, and even an occasional purple or orange one. There weren’t any streets as we know them in the East, which I knew would make it difficult to find the house in which Maurice Quarlé lived.
 
 
“Where do we begin?” Kathy asked.
 
 
Bill pointed to a cluster of houses a few hundred feet away. “We might as well start there,” he said.
 
 
We reached the area he’d indicated and slowly went from house to house, looking for a sign that said SERENITY HOUSE. We got lucky. It was the second one we passed. A small front porch contained a variety of old, broken-down furniture, a mattress, the frame of a bicycle minus its wheels, and assorted other discarded items. I saw no sign of life and wondered whether we had made the trip for nothing. But I wasn’t about to leave without ascertaining that for sure. I started up a rickety set of stairs, but Bill stopped me.
 
 
“I’ll go,” he said.
 
 
Kathy and I watched as he went up onto the porch and knocked. There was no reply. He looked back at us, shrugged, and knocked again, louder this time. He tried the door. It opened with a groan.
 
 
Kathy and I joined him on the porch and peered through the open door. Aside from minimal light coming through a window at the rear of the house, it was dark inside. Silhouetted against the window was what appeared to be large pieces of furniture.
 
 
Bill stepped inside, and we followed him tentatively. There was a musty smell that overrode other indefinable odors.
 
 
A narrow staircase was to our left. It occurred to me that the house didn’t seem large enough to contain apartments for rent. Not only that, the chaos on the first floor made me wonder whether Maurice Quarlé—or anyone else, for that matter—actually lived there.
 
 
“Stay here,” Bill said as he started up the stairs.
 
 
“I’m coming with you,” said Kathy.
 
 
I fell in behind them.
 
 
When Bill reached a tiny landing at the top, he motioned with his hand for us to wait. We did as he asked, and he proceeded down a confined hallway covered with threadbare carpeting to a door at the far end. Now I could see that there was the possibility of apartments, although they would have to be very small ones. I counted four doors off the hall.
 
 
There was another hand signal from Bill for us not to come any farther. Kathy and I stayed where we were as Bill opened the door. If someone did live there, he or she was a trusting soul. Neither the front door nor the door Bill had just opened needed a key.
 
 
Bill disappeared through the open door. I started to join him, but he suddenly stepped back into the hall and said, “I don’t think you’ll want to see this, Mrs. Fletcher.”
 
 
His statement only made me want to see what I’d been told not to see. I went to where Bill stood, just outside the room, and looked past him. A man, a very dead man, was sprawled in a large yellow upholstered wing chair. His arms were flung over the sides, and his legs were akimbo in front of him. His head had fallen to one side; his mouth was wide open, as were his eyes. He wore a pale blue T-shirt, through which a large amount of blood had seeped from his chest. The cause of the bleeding was evident. The handle of a knife protruded from his heart, once beating and circulating blood throughout his body.
 
 
Kathy now joined us. She uttered an anguished cry and shoved her fist to her mouth to muffle it. I entered the room and approached the body.
 
 
“Don’t!” Kathy cried.
 
 
I ignored her and placed two fingertips against the side of the dead man’s throat. It was an academic exercise. That he was dead was beyond debate. But I did it anyway, from force of habit.
 
 
I looked around the cramped room. There was a single bed in one corner and an armoire in another. There was no closet. A small desk beneath a window was encrusted with years of dirt. I went to the desk and looked down at items strewn about on it, including a wallet. I opened it. Peering back at me from beneath a plastic sleeve was an Alaska driver’s license. The picture on it was of the dead man in the chair. The name on the license was MAURICE QUARLÉ.
 
 
Chapter Nine
 
 
The natural instinct was to call 911, but since I had
 
 
Trooper McQuesten’s direct line, I dialed that on my cell phone instead. He answered on the first ring. I told him what we had discovered, and he said he would dispatch a team there immediately. He and two uniformed troopers arrived in less than ten minutes.
 
 
McQuesten greeted us on the porch, where we had congregated while waiting for his arrival. I judged him to be in his mid to late thirties. He was a big man, well over six feet tall. He wore a gray and black tweed jacket, wrinkled gray pants, and muddy ankle-high boots. His white shirt appeared to be too tight for his sizable neck; its collar points turned up. The tie he wore was maroon, in an old-fashioned knit style.
 
 
“Where’s the body?” he asked.
 
 
“Upstairs,” I replied. “The room at the end of the hall.”
 
 
He dispatched his officers into the house, but he stayed on the porch to speak with us.
 
 
“What brought you here?” he asked.
 
 
I explained why Kathy and I had a particular interest in Maurice Quarlé.
 
 
“So you think he had something to do with your sister’s disappearance?” he said to Kathy.
 
 
“I’m the one who came to that conclusion,” I said.
 
 
“Do you have any tangible evidence of that, Mrs. Fletcher?”
 
 
“No, just a series of coincidences. He seemed to have spent a great deal of time with Wilimena Copeland on her cruise. Besides, another passenger who knew him didn’t speak very highly of his character.”
 
 
McQuesten smiled. “Whoever that is,” he said, “is a pretty good judge of people. Mr. Quarlé was not what you’d call one of Juneau’s most sterling citizens.”
 
 
“I take it he’s no stranger to you,” I said.
 
 
“Hardly. Maurice has been in and out of trouble here in Juneau ever since he arrived four or five years ago. Nothing violent, just a succession of scams, conning people out of money, bad checks, a couple of phony credit cards, things like that. But despite that record, he had a legitimate side to him when it came to steamship companies. He wangled jobs aboard some ships teaching French to passengers, and he made some money booking tour groups—got a commission, I suppose. He was a pleasant enough little guy, talked a good game. But that’s not surprising. You can’t be an effective con man unless you have the gift of gab.”
 
 
“I would imagine someone like that makes quite a few enemies,” I said.
 
 
“Sure. By the way, you haven’t introduced me to your friends.”
 
 
“This is Wilimena Copeland’s sister, Kathy Copeland, and this is our friend Bill Henderson.”
 
 
As McQuesten shook hands with them, one of his officers emerged from the house and asked whether McQuesten was coming up to the murder scene. He said he was, excused himself from us, and followed the uniformed trooper back inside.
 
 
“This is just beginning to set in on me,” Bill Henderson said. “I never figured when I booked this cruise that I’d be coming across dead bodies.”
 
 
“It’s my fault,” Kathy said. “If I hadn’t asked you to accompany us here, you wouldn’t have been subjected to this.”
 
 
“Don’t give it a second thought,” he said, giving her a playful hug. “I lead a pretty dull life. I can use some excitement.”
 
 
“Who could have done such a terrible thing?” Kathy asked no one in particular. “How can anyone take another person’s life like that?”

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