The Chocolate Pirate Plot (18 page)

“Watch out! I'm going to hit him again!” I said. I felt along the gunwale.

And my hand met strange fingers.

I shrieked. The hand grasped mine. I grasped his. We clung together in a sort of mad handshake.

The situation turned to total confusion. I still had the paddle in my other hand, and I began to whack at the attacker's fingers with it. He hung on, twisting my hand painfully. I couldn't get a good swing with one hand, so my whacking wasn't very effective. If I'd had a hatchet I could have done some real damage. Probably to myself.

Joe wasn't beside me. I figured that out when the Shepherd's motor began to chug, and the boat moved. In the dark I didn't know what direction it was moving.

The guy in the water still had hold of my hand, and half the blows I was aiming at him were hitting my own knuckles. Finally I dropped the oar on the deck, leaned over, and bit the guy on the wrist. He cursed and turned my hand loose. Then he gurgled, apparently because he had lost his footing and his head had sunk below the surface of the water. But the boat was still tipping toward him, so I knew he had kept his grip on the gunwale.

During all this, still in complete darkness, Joe had been falling over seats, kicking soft drink cans around, and generally raising a ruckus. He and I were both yelling out stupid remarks. “Get him!” “Start the boat!” “I can't see anything.”

Then the motor stopped its gentle chugging and gunned hard.

The moment that happened, the guy hanging on the side let go. Once he wasn't pulling the side down, the Shepherd bounced up, and I nearly fell over backward again. By then my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark—we were under trees, so the moon was no help—and I had a vague sense that someone was climbing onto our dock.

I yelled, “He's getting away!”

Then I saw lights far away. They were bouncing off the trees that arched over Joe's drive.

I tried to yell louder than the motor. “Someone's coming!”

There was motion on the shore. A running figure—two figures—crossed between us and the bouncing lights. The lights grew brighter. A vehicle turned into the parking area beside Joe's shop.

Joe cut the motor to idle, and we both yelled, “It's Will!”

Will drives an old Jeep SUV. I had recognized the way his headlights are set and those aggressive vertical bars Jeep puts on its front ends, and I guess Joe did, too. That front end has pulled into our drive many times.

Now Joe and I began our confused yelling act again. “Go back!” “Stay in the car!” “Drive off!” “Go away!”

I didn't know who had tried to waylay us at the dock, but I did know someone had fired at least one shot. I had a horrible vision of Will and Brenda innocently stepping out of Will's car and meeting the bad guys with guns face-to-face.

Our shouting, naturally, produced exactly the opposite effect from the one we'd wanted. Will turned the Jeep around so that its headlights were shining on the dock, then drove a dozen feet or so closer to the river. He and Brenda got out and ran toward us, giving their own confused yells. “What's wrong?” “Where are you?” “What's happened?”

Joe gave a sigh. “I guess the bad guys have gone,” he said. “Whoever they were.”

He turned the boat's lights back on and used the spotlight to scan the bank. Then we came into the dock again. This time Will caught our mooring line and secured it to the cleat.

He and Brenda were full of questions, but Joe urged us all to get inside the shop before we began to talk.

“And lock the door,” he said.

I had a horrid feeling that the intruders would be waiting inside, but the door was still locked, and when we got inside the shop, everything seemed undisturbed. Once we'd called the cops and I'd tested the plumbing, we all began to try to figure out what we'd seen, making notes so we could pass them along to the lawmen.

Brenda and Will hadn't seen anything.

“We were sitting on the deck at the Dockster having a soda,” Will said. “We saw you guys go by, headed upriver. And I thought we could meet you at the shop and I could borrow that wrench tonight. When we got here, we didn't see any vehicles parked in the drive or on the road leading in. Joe's truck was the only vehicle. The first we knew that something was wrong was when we pulled into the parking area here. All of a sudden you guys began to yell.”

“Joe?” I said. “What made you know something was wrong? You told me not to tie up before I saw a thing.”

“The light outside the shop was out.”

“Oh. I didn't notice that until later. The spot on the sedan is so bright, I didn't even realize that the shop light wasn't on until you doused the boat's lights.”

“The shop light could simply have burned out, so that might not have meant anything. I think maybe I saw movement, too. Anyway, the situation just looked funny. I'm not entirely sure why.”

When Hogan came—seems as if the poor guy is always coming to help Joe and me out after some emergency—we repeated our story.

“What I don't understand,” I said, “is why? What was the point of all this? Were they trying to rob us? That's stupid. Nobody carries a lot of money or valuables when they go out on a boat. If they wanted the boat itself—which is worth quite a bit of money but would be hard to sell—it would have been easier to wait until we tied it up and went off and left it alone.”

Joe spoke quietly. “You're forgetting the shot.”

“At this point, Joe, I'm not positive that I heard a shot. In fact, it doesn't make sense. If the guys—and I'm sure there were two of them—had a pistol, why didn't they use it again?”

“That's a good question, Lee. And my question is, why are you alive?”

“Me?”

“Yes. I had a good view as the first guy ran onto the dock. He did have a pistol.”

Joe reached over and took my hand. “I yelled when I saw him.”

“You yelled for me to get down.”

“Right. The reason I yelled was that he was standing squarely on the dock and aiming that pistol right at you.”

“All I saw was the figure. I didn't see the pistol.”

“It was there. He aimed right at you and fired from no more than five feet away.”

He squeezed my hand. “I still don't see how he could have missed. By all rights, you should be dead.”

He blinked, and I saw tears in his eyes.

I got a few tears in my eyes to match. Neither of us could say much, and Brenda, Will, and Hogan got a demonstration of effective mutual hugging. It must have been nearly five minutes before I could get another word out.

“Okay,” I said finally. “We're back to the question we've had all along. Why?”

Hogan nodded. “A lot of strange things have happened, and you two seem to be concerned with them. But I sure don't see the reason. Lee, you're positive that you'd never seen the dead man before?”

“I swear. He was a complete stranger.”

“Joe?”

Joe grimaced. “I can't swear, Hogan. I've represented a lot of people. And people's appearances change. I don't remember him, but I can't say he's not a former client.”

Hogan nodded. “We'll see what happens in the morning, when Max Morgan takes a look at him.”

Joe and I stayed in our own house that night, but I don't think either of us slept much. Anyway, I was at the office a half hour early, and not just because I knew Aunt Nettie was going to have lots of questions. If I'm just lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I figure I might as well get up.

Joe left even earlier than I did, saying he wanted to see what was going on at the shop. Hogan had left a patrol car overnight and had promised that the state police would have a crime-scene crew there early the next morning.

“Maybe they'll find a bullet,” Joe said.

“Do you think it hit the boat?”

“I hope not!” Joe and I both chuckled. We both know his boats are just slightly behind me in his affections.

“Don't you think it went into the water?” I said.

“Probably. If that's what happened, even a metal detector might have trouble finding it in the weeds and mud.”

At ten o'clock I was comforting myself with a cup of coffee and my substitute for pancakes, a maple truffle (“a round milk chocolate truffle flavored with Michigan maple syrup”). I jumped when the phone rang.

“Hi,” Hogan said. “I've got a picture I want you to take a look at. Can you come over?”

“Be right there.”

I walked the two blocks to the police station as quickly as possible. When I got there, somehow I wasn't surprised to see Joe pulling into a parking place. We walked in together.

Hogan didn't say anything. He simply motioned us back to his office and pointed to the computer screen.

“Can either of you pick out Hal Weldon?”

“I've never seen Hal Weldon,” I said.

“Take a guess.”

The black-and-white photo displayed was a group shot of a gymnastics team. It was even labeled “South Chicago Gymnastics Team,” along with a date five years earlier.

I sat down in Hogan's chair, and Joe leaned over my shoulder. We spoke at the same time.

“Dark-haired guy,” Joe said. “Back row.”

“Second from the left. Tallest one there,” I said.

I looked at Hogan. “And I'd definitely say he's now the late Hal Weldon.”

Hogan nodded. “So you both identify him as the dead man. That's what I thought, too. The name in the caption is ‘Harold Weldon.' But did you ever see him alive?”

I shook my head no immediately, but Joe hesitated.

“He does seem familiar,” he said. “His hair was shorter when that picture was taken.”

Joe went into the outer office, and in a minute I heard him talking on his phone. “Minnie? How're you doing?”

I knew Minnie was the office manager at the poverty-law office where Joe had worked in Chicago. So apparently Joe wanted to check on some case he'd handled then. That would have been at least five years earlier, or about the time the gymnastics team had posed for its photo.

Having picked the dead man out of the group, I began to look at the rest of the team members. Immediately one almost screamed, “Me!” It was one of the people in the middle row. This fellow had medium brown hair, lighter than Hal Weldon's, and he wasn't as tall as Hall. But his sleeveless gymnastics outfit displayed particularly broad and powerful shoulders.

I punched PRINT. Hogan said, “I'll get it,” and I realized the police department printer was in the outer office. In less than a minute I was looking at a hard copy of the photo, only a bit more murky than the one on the screen.

The guy looked familiar, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen him.

I looked at Hogan. “Where's the cutline on this photo?”

“It's a separate file.” Hogan picked up a printout from his desk. “Here's my copy. You might want to read the front row.”

The third person in the front row was identified as Jeremy Matlock.

“Matlock? That's awfully close to Mattox,” I said. “I guess Jeremy really was working under an alias. Max may have brought him to my office, but I wouldn't recognize him from this picture.”

“And we still don't know where Jeremy is—whether he's Mattox or Matlock. We don't know whether he's dead or alive.”

Hogan and I hadn't had time to say anything more when Joe popped his head in through the doorway.

“I defended Harold Weldon in a malicious mischief case,” he said.

“M
innie's going to fax some records of the case over to Mom's office,” Joe said.

“We have a fax machine here,” Hogan said with a grin.

Joe grinned in return. “Yeah, but I need to look the case over before I tell you about it. There's that darn confidentiality rule I've got to follow. But maybe the stuff Minnie sends will remind me of what it was about.”

Joe and I had stood up to leave when the outer door swung open so hard that it bounced, and Max Morgan made an entrance. The theater director was wearing an all-black outfit—black jeans, black dress shirt, and black tennies, but he'd added a silk scarf striped in jewel tones and draped inside his collar as an ascot.

As soon as he was inside, he stopped and struck an attitude, holding his left hand in the air dramatically.

“Alas! Poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest.”

Joe gave a cough that I recognized as smothering a laugh—not that laughing would have been out of place, since Max was obviously joking.