Voyage into Violence (14 page)

“As soon as we get in,” Bill promised. “I'll send the picture of the woman, too. Have Cambridge try it for size.”

“You don't give up at all,” Stein said. “And, suppose it is? We already know he was looking for her. Had been, anyway.”

“Right,” Bill said. “All the same.”

Stein promised, needlessly, that they would keep at it. Bill replaced the telephone receiver and looked at it reproachfully. He went to the doctor's office, and was taken to the infirmary, where Cholly Pinkham lay in bed, conscious—and extremely embarrassed. Asked how he felt, he admitted to a headache. Asked what he could tell, he became more embarrassed than ever.

“Let you down, cap'n,” he said. “The old man, too.”

Because, he remembered nothing—at any rate, remembered nothing useful. He had lain down on one of the beds, in the darkness, determined to keep awake. He had waked up, an hour or so ago, where he was now. Between, there was nothing. It worried young Cholly; it frightened him a little.

“Perfectly natural,” the doctor told him. “You got knocked about, son. Knocked it out of you.”

“Let everybody down,” Cholly said, and was disconsolate. They left him so.

“Concussion,” the ship's surgeon said, needlessly, when they were outside. “Wipes things out, sometimes.”

Bill knew that. Would what had been wiped out return? The physician could only shrug, only point out that time would tell.

“I'd like someone with him tonight,” Bill said. “To see he isn't—bothered.”

“That way, is it?” the physician said and, when Bill said it might be, said he would pass the word. “It's all a sticky business,” the doctor said, and Bill agreed it was indeed, and went to look at the gun cases, inboard on the promenade deck, forward on the starboard side—just where a promenader, making a clockwise circuit, might most easily bark shins on them. The cases were chests, somewhat larger than coffins. They were both padlocked.

They stood under the windows of promenade deck staterooms. The occupants of at least three rooms could look almost directly down on them, those in another could peer out, at angles, and see the chests, if they wanted to go to the trouble. There did not seem to be any reason why they should or why Bill Weigand, having seen that there appeared to be nothing to see, should stand in front of the boxes and look down at them as, in fact, he had done before. Now he was not really seeing the chests; he was simply, not too happily, wondering where—where the hell—he went next. This uncertainty sometimes afflicts detectives, as it does others. It is, of course, nothing to reveal in the presence of possible malefactors.

Standing so bemused, looking at nothing in particular, Bill Weigand began to feel that odd, largely intangible, creeping sensation which sometimes results from being surreptitiously looked at. Bill did not immediately alter his position; he tried, more practically, to determine, without himself moving, from what direction he might, subconsciously, have noted movement. Presumably from the windows of one of the staterooms which overlooked the gun cases.

Bill shook his head, pantomiming bewilderment—which, at the moment, came easily. Then he crouched in front of the nearest case and began, intently, to examine as ordinary a padlock as he could remember to have seen.

The window directly above him was, as he had noticed earlier, protected by venetian blinds, set to slant downward toward the deck. Bill looked up, quickly, at the window above him.

He saw eyes and part—not enough—of a face. Then he saw movement, and then nothing.

From the height of the eyes, from what he had been able to see of the face, the observer had been a man. The man had not wanted to be caught looking. Which, since the spectacle of a detective staring moodily at locked boxes might legitimately interest almost anyone, was worth considering. Bill Weigand considered it briefly and again looked up. This time he saw nothing between the slats of the blinds. He stood up, resisted the impulse to do a little carefree whistling, and sauntered—he could not resist that—to the nearest door off the deck. He stepped over the high sill, and turned right. The three staterooms which overlooked the boxes were P 19, P 21 and P 23.

The doors of the rooms were closed. The room from which the observer—almost certainly a man—had looked out was P 21. Bill knocked on it, expecting nothing. He got nothing. He turned the doorknob and found it locked. Bill walked aft through the starboard passageway. The other room from which the cases could be observed, although less easily, was P 25. He went down to A Deck and to the purser's office.

Stateroom P 21 was occupied by Mrs. and Miss Macklin. And Mr. and Mrs. Carl Buckley occupied P 19. The occupants of P 23 were named Conklin, which struck no note at all. But Respected Captain J. R. Folsom occupied, alone, stateroom P 25—from which he could have kept an angled eye on his arsenal.

Bill went aft to the sun deck, and found only a few sunning, the Norths and Dorian not among them. He went down to the promenade deck, and observed that Mr. and Mrs. Buckley were among the swimmers—and that Staff Captain Smythe-Hornsby was permitting himself an off-duty drink, in the company of Mr. Hammond Jones.

Bill found an unoccupied deck chair in the sun and paused to consider.

At a certain stage—Bill could remember very few cases in which this had not been true—a shape of things begins to form in the attentive mind. The shape is vague at first—amorphous at the center and, at the circumference, diffusing into mist. But the shape is there—the incipient shape. The task, thereafter, is one of definition. When the shape begins to appear, no little part of the job is done, although the hardest part may still remain.

But the circumstances which had led to the death of J. Orville Marsh, to the attack on young Cholly Pinkham, had, still, no semblance of a shape. Bill went back over it—went to Folsom's sudden appearance at a stateroom door; to the varied—and still incomprehensible—effects of the dead detective. He considered Mrs. Macklin's shrill, almost hysterical, assertion that someone had prowled her room—an assertion to which events of the past few minutes gave some confirmation. Someone, not Mrs. Macklin and not her daughter, had stood at the window of the room and peered out of it—and had got out of the room long before Bill reached the door. (Or, still in it, had merely waited for Bill to go away?) He tried to fit, with these things, the search of his own stateroom and the oddly half-hearted attack on Pam North. Bill smiled faintly to himself over the last. Since she had not been hurt, nor Jerry either, the occurrence had had its almost comic aspects. He sought to add to these things the presence on the
Carib Queen
of a polished young man who might once have involved himself in the theft of jewels, and he considered, also, the apparent determination of a physically attractive young woman to put her worst foot forward.

And no shape appeared. One could not, as Pam had previously pointed out, add apples and elephants. There was no shape—and there was no glaring absence of shape. Distortion may mean as much as conformity; the just perceptibly erratic behavior of an orbit-following celestial body may hint at the presence of another body previously unseen and lead to a search for it.… It was proving easy to grow drowsy in the sun. And then something in Bill's mind said, “Wait.” Obediently, Bill waited. A glimmer came to him.

About the murder itself there had been a kind of preposterousness. It was as if a prank had been played—an absurd, unlikely prank—and had got out of hand. There was something outrageous about it, and something incongruous. That the sword had been sharpened to cut a wedding cake in Worcester, Massachusetts, was somehow the final touch.

But the attack on Pinkham had been, in method and execution, as unlike the murder of Marsh as one act of violence can easily be unlike another. On the young steward, a blackjack had been used—from the nature of the wound, that was almost certain. And a blackjack is as professional as a sawed-off shotgun. Bill had been a policeman too long, encountered too many of the vagaries of crime, to believe that a murderer always limits himself to one weapon. But a sword and a blackjack—and then, with Pam North, the mere laying on of heavy hands. Variety was being carried to extremes.

Bill considered this distortion. It occurred to him that the distortion might have been provided for that very purpose—the confusion of a diligent detective. It was, of course, also conceivable that several things were going on at the same time—which would be disorderly of them, but not unprecedented.

It was, Bill thought, all very disorderly. The atmosphere of a pleasure cruise and a murder investigation fitted as badly together as a sword and a blackjack. Embarked on such a cruise, people leave their backgrounds behind them. But a crime is like an iceberg, floating for the most part submerged—the iceberg in its ocean, the crime in its past.

He left the sunny chair and went forward, stopping at the purser's bureau. There he made a request that Mr. Jules Barron be paged and, on his response, asked to attend the captain in his cabin. Bill then walked forward, to inform Captain Cunningham of a visitor to be expected. He went through the smoke room on his way.

Respected Captain J. R. Folsom and Mrs. Macklin were together at a table, with drinks in front of them. Folsom appeared to be doing most of the talking. On the other hand, Mrs. Macklin seemed to be doing most of the drinking. Folsom had an untouched glass in front of him. Hers was almost empty.

The Norths were, rather uncharacteristically, drinking tea. It had been Pam who suggested it, after they had, by mutual consent, left the movie at its middle. They might, she said, as well find out what went on “up there.” Up there was the Grand Lounge, which was across the Grand Entrance from the smoke room as one went forward on the sun deck of the
Carib Queen
. In the Grand Lounge dwelt dignity, and what was going on was tea.

The lounge was a large room, stretching the width of the ship, with wide windows on three sides. Its frequenters turned out to be somewhat older, on the average, than those of the smoke room, although a younger group clustered at a piano and told each other to play “that” and then sang to “that,” but in moderate voices. Elsewhere bridge went on, and canasta and the serving of tea. The Norths had tea and small, neat sandwiches, and looked through a window at the sparkling south Atlantic. Or was it already the Caribbean, or even the Gulf of Mexico? “They ought to mark them,” Pam said, and poured more tea, which really they ought to drink oftener. The idea of labeling such large bodies of water engaged them both, and they proposed methods—Pam had an idea that it might somehow be done with kites, at least in pleasant weather. It was agreeable, for once, to have nothing to do except label oceans.

But the public-address system, although its tone was dulcet, brought them back. It requested that Mr. Jules Barron communicate with the purser. And it was at precisely that moment that Pam, looking around the pleasant room at the pleasant people, found that three of the people were Mr. and Mrs. Furstenberg and Hilda Macklin.

They were at a table, across the room from the Norths, and teacups were in front of them—and Hilda was leaning a little forward, talking with what seemed, as seen from a distance, to be marked concentration. Furstenberg listened to her gravely, and shook his head—but whether in negation, or perhaps in sympathy, was only to be guessed. There was an expression of gravity, also on Mrs. Furstenberg's cheerful face.

“Will Mr. Jules Barron please communicate with the purser?” the public-address system asked, for the second time. And then it seemed to Pam, still watching the three—the perhaps rather oddly assorted three?—that the repetition of the request interrupted Hilda Macklin, and that she broke off, as if in mid-sentence, and raised her head as if listening. And this, if true, was somewhat interesting.

And then, from the group around the piano, a good-looking—an almost dashing—dark young man detached himself and began to walk through the room toward the door.

It was, Pam realized, the same dark young man who had—perhaps—made some slight efforts to strike up an acquaintance with Hilda Macklin, and had seemed to get nowhere.

If it was also Mr. Jules Barron, on his way to communicate with the purser, it would be—perhaps—quite interesting, although precisely why it should be was not immediately apparent, even to Pam herself.

If Bill hadn't left them out of the party in the captain's quarters before lunch, she wouldn't have to wonder if the man was Jules Barron. For that exclusion, Bill almost deserved not to be told that at the mention of Barron's name Hilda had—perhaps—broken off what she was saying and made a gesture of sudden attention, even of surprise. Almost deserved—but, of course, not quite.

8

Apparently Mr. Jules Barron had assumed his summons was to another party. He did not say so. But, finding only Captain Cunningham and Weigand in the captain's quarters, he permitted dark eyebrows to rise in polite enquiry. He was told, by Captain Cunningham, that it was good of him to come. Cunningham then looked at Weigand and waited.

“We have a problem, Mr. Barron,” Bill said. “We think you may be able to help us.”

“Me?” Barron said, and then added that he doubted it, but that, of course, anything he could do.

“Right,” Bill said. “The problem we have concerns a murder. A man named Marsh has been killed.”

This time, Barron's eyebrows indicated astonishment.

“On the boat?” he asked, and Cunningham winced slightly, and Bill said, “Right, Mr. Barron. Mr. Marsh was a private detective.” To this, Jules Barron, who was gayly arrayed, said he didn't get it. He looked from one to another, and repeated that he didn't get it. “Why me?” he asked, amplifying.

“The photographs of jewelry,” Bill said. “The ones we were looking at earlier. Mr. Marsh had them in his possession when he was killed.”