Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (5 page)

“You woke me up at six o'clock in the morning to tell me Beverly played the slot machines last night?”

“We had a fight over it,” Lars admitted sheepishly. “She locked me out of the room. I spent the night out on deck until it got too cold. Then I went upstairs to the buffet. I've been there ever since.”

As a veteran of my own relationship disasters, I felt nothing but sympathy. “You're not the first groom to be locked out of a honeymoon suite,” I assured him. “And you sure as hell won't be the last. Do you think she's still mad this morning?”

Lars shrugged his shoulders and looked miserable. “Beats me,” he said.

“What did she say?” I asked. “Tell me exactly.”

“That she'd spent as many years as she was going to living with some stubborn old coot who was forever telling her what to do. She told me that if she wanted to spend her ‘mad money' on slot machines, then it was nobody's business but her own. She said if I didn't like it I could lump it—and sleep somewhere else.”

In other words, Margaret Featherman wasn't the only passenger on the
Starfire Breeze
who wasn't letting anyone else tell her what to do. I didn't like being cast into the role of marriage counselor, but there I was—caught in the middle.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said that earning money was too damned hard to just stand on the sidelines and watch somebody throw it away. You know, you put the coin in the hole and it goes
chink, chink, chink,
and nothing happens, and no money ever comes back out.”

“Look,” I said. “Wait until eight o'clock or so, then show up at the door. On the way there, stop by the gift shop and buy something nice. Maybe even some flowers, if they happen to have some on board. Tap on the door. When she opens it, hand her the flowers or whatever, tell her you're sorry, and everything will be fine.”

“But I'm not sorry,” Lars insisted. “I'm pissed. Couldn't I just stay here with you? You've got a nice big room.”

Through some kind of travel agent wizardry I had lucked into a junior suite at the last minute. It was a nice room with a marble-surrounded Jacuzzi tub and a separate shower in the bath. As rooms go, it was more than large enough to accommodate two people, but I sure as hell didn't want to spend the next six days sharing it and my king-sized bed with a disgruntled bridegroom who probably snored like an eighteen-wheeler going up a steep grade.

Thinking about a solution, I stalled for time by taking a tentative sip of my coffee and scalding the top layer of skin on my upper lip in the process. Meanwhile Lars downed the contents of his cup as though the temperature of his drink were less than lukewarm. Watching him, the term “asbestos lips” came to mind.

“I'm sure Beverly will get over it,” I offered.

“Nope,” he insisted. “I don't think so.”

For several moments we sat in stark silence drinking from our respective cups. “So how was dinner?” I asked.

“Dinner?” Lars growled. “Too darned much food. Do you have any idea how much food goes to waste on a ship like this? It's downright criminal.”

I waited for him to tell me about the starving children in China. He didn't.

“And all that foreign food on the menu. What's the matter with good old American food? Whatever happened to pot roast? Whatever happened to chicken pot pie? And why on earth would anyone want to eat snails?”

In other words, the escargots hadn't been a big hit.

“How about the people at your table?” I asked. “What are they like?”

Out of deference to the newlywed couple's privacy, we had agreed in advance that Lars and Beverly would eat during the first seating, and I would take the second.

“They hooked us up with a couple of kids,” he grumbled. “Max and Dotty. They're here celebrating their fortieth,” he added. “As if sticking together for forty years is anything to brag about.”

“Look,” I said. “I'll go shower. You hang tough. Once I'm dressed, we'll take a turn around the deck. Things'll probably look better in the clear light of day.”

“It's raining,” Lars said. “It's September. What do you expect?”

I reached over and pulled aside the blackout curtains. Sure enough, outside nothing was visible but a second curtain, this one made up of sheets of falling rain.

Grabbing some clothes from the closet, I disappeared into the bathroom. I came out twenty minutes later—shaved and dressed—to find Lars sound asleep. Snoring softly, he was sitting bolt upright with his now-empty coffee cup clutched in one massive fist. I figured that if he could sleep that soundly having just downed a cup of full-strength coffee, he must have needed the rest. So, recalling that sage advice about letting sleeping dogs lie, I slipped out the door and left him there. After hanging the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the doorknob, I went in search of Beverly Piedmont Jenssen.

The
Starfire Breeze
is no small potatoes. According to company brochures, it carries two thousand passengers and a crew of a thousand. Using my well-worn detective skills, I went first to my grandmother's last-known address—her stateroom on Bahia Deck. The door to her room was ajar, and an attendant was busily making up the bed. “Breakfast,” he told me when I inquired. “Mrs. Jenssen went to breakfast.”

The ship is fourteen stories tall. It boasts two formal dining rooms—the Crystal and the Regal—as well as a twenty-four-hour buffet up on the Lido Deck. Knowing my grandmother, I tried the buffet first—to no avail. After that, I tried the dining rooms. To the dismay of a full contingent of concerned wait staff, I waved aside all offers of help and went wandering through the white-tableclothed wilderness of the Crystal Dining Room. In a windowed alcove near the back of the ballroom-sized room I came across Marc Alley huddled at a table for two with an early-forties blondish woman armed with a laptop computer as well as a small tape recorder.

He was up and dressed—nattily coat-and-tie-dressed—but he looked more than a little worse for wear. His overused appearance reminded me of some of my nightly debaucheries back in the good old days when I was hell-bent on misspending my own youth. Since Marc was obviously busy with the scheduled interview he had mentioned the night before, I was prepared to walk past without interrupting them. To my surprise, he waved me over to the table.

“How's it going, Beau?” he said.

“Fine,” I told him. “How about you?”

He gestured toward the woman seated with him. “This is Christine Moran,” he said. “She's a journalist. This is Beau Beaumont.”

The blonde held out her hand and looked me up and down. “Beau Beaumont,” she said. “Isn't that a little repetitive?”

As a cop I've always had a natural aversion to journalists of any kind. Christine Moran's greeting did nothing to make me want to change that position. I smiled back at her. “Let's put it this way,” I said. “Given a choice between Beau Beaumont or Jonas Piedmont Beaumont, which one would you prefer?”

She nodded. “You're right. Glad to meet you, Beau.”

“Are you with one of the papers?” I asked, thinking of Seattle's two dailies.

Christine shook her head. “I'm a freelancer,” she said. “Mostly medical stuff for various popular-science and health-type journals. I'm covering the neurology meeting on board. I'm also interviewing Mr. Renaissance Man here as a sidebar to a feature article I'm doing on Dr. Featherman.”

“Renaissance?” I asked.

Marc shrugged. “That's how I feel,” he explained. “Once I had the brain surgery and my seizures stopped, I felt like I'd been reborn, like Dr. Featherman had taken a terrible monkey off my back and given me back my life. I could have called myself Lazarus, I suppose, but I prefer Renaissance.”

I caught sight of the outer edge of a hickey peeking out from under the collar of Marc's starched and pressed white shirt. If Harrison Featherman had dealt with one part of Marc's being reborn, Dr. Featherman's ex-wife had evidently made her own contribution to his sense of well-being, if not necessarily his health.

I took another look around the dining room to ascertain that Beverly Jenssen wasn't to be found among the other diners. “If you're trying to do an interview, I'd better let you get on with it.”

“Wait,” Marc said. “Do you have plans for later on today?”

“It's an at-sea day,” I told him. “Barring a helicopter ride, I don't suppose I'm going anywhere.”

“I'd like to talk to you for a little while,” he said. “I need your advice on something. What time would be convenient? I'm busy with the conference all morning. How about one o'clock?”

I couldn't imagine what kind of counsel Marc Alley would want from me. If it was some kind of advice to the lovelorn, I knew I was out of my league. “Sure,” I said. “Where should we meet?”

I would have liked to suggest my stateroom, but I had no idea whether or not I'd still be dealing with Lars. “How about right here?” Marc returned. “We can have lunch.”

“Right,” I said. “That'll be fine.”

Nodding to Christine Moran, I skedaddled out of the Crystal and took the atrium's glass elevator two floors up to Regal. And that's where I found Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, delicately slicing her way through a thick piece of syrup-drenched French toast.

“Well,” she sniffed as I took a seat at the table. “I suppose Lars came crying on your shoulder, and now he's sent you here to try talking some sense into me, right?”

“Something like that,” I admitted.

“But he didn't offer any kind of an apology, did he?”

“No, but—”

“No buts,” Beverly interrupted. “If he wants to talk to me, he'd better come on his own two feet, and he'd better be carrying his hat in his hand.”

“It's just that he didn't like you gambling, Grandma,” I said. “For some reason, it really upset him.”

“I noticed that without having to be told,” she replied.

“Don't you think you could tone it down a little?”

“Jonas,” she said. Beverly Jenssen was already sitting bolt upright in her chair, but when she said my name, she seemed to gain in stature—the way an angry cat can seemingly double in size by standing its fur on end. “I was gambling with my own money,” she said. “And what I choose to do with my money is my business.”

“Lars just hates to see you throwing your money away.”

“Who's throwing it away? At last count, I was up two hundred and eighty-six dollars, so I don't see what he's complaining about. But the money's beside the point. In fact, it has nothing to do with money, nothing at all.”

“It doesn't?” I asked.

“No. Lars wants to be able to tell me what to do, and that's not going to happen. It turns out I don't even like slot machines all that much, but as soon as he told me we were leaving, I decided I would sit on that stool the rest of the night—until hell froze over, if necessary.”

“Look, Grandma,” I argued. “This is your honeymoon. What would it hurt to just go along with things?”

“It would hurt a lot,” she retorted. “That kind of bossiness has to be nipped in the bud. If Lars had said he was tired and asked me couldn't we please go back to the room, I would have gone along in a minute without a complaint. But he
told
me we were going. There's a big difference.”

Beverly Jenssen finished polishing off her French toast and pushed her plate away. An alert buser swooped over to collect it. “Will you be having breakfast, sir?” he asked, with a coffeepot poised over the clean cup in front of me.

“No, thanks,” I told him. “I'm just visiting.”

“Very good, sir,” he replied, and disappeared with Beverly's plate in one hand and the coffeepot in the other.

“You were at our wedding, weren't you, Jonas?” she asked.

“Yes, of course I was.”

“And do you remember my saying anything about love, honor, and
obey
?”

“Well, no.”

“Right,” she said. “That's because I had the judge leave out the ‘obey' part. We said love, honor, and cherish. Not obey. You see,” she added, “obey was in my first wedding ceremony. I'm a person who keeps my word. Since I made the promise, I kept it. But keeping that vow to your grandfather, Jonas, cost me far more than I ever would have thought possible. I lost my daughter over it, and I almost lost you, too. I'm not going to live that way again.”

Beverly set her cup back in the saucer with enough force that coffee slopped out over the top. She used her napkin to brush away a mist of tears that suddenly veiled her eyes. That's when I understood that this lover's quarrel really had nothing to do with slot machines and everything to do with my grandfather—Jonas Piedmont, my biological grandfather.

My mother was pregnant with me when her boyfriend, my father, was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way back to his naval base in Bremerton. Jonas Piedmont had disowned his pregnant teenaged daughter. All those years she struggled to raise me on her own, he had never so much as lifted a finger to help her. Not only had he turned his own back on my mother, he had forced his wife, my grandmother, to do the same. It was long after my mother's death from cancer and only when my grandfather had been crippled by a stroke and was at death's door himself that I had reestablished contact with them.

No, as far as Beverly Piedmont Jenssen was concerned, there were far bigger issues at stake than an evening spent plying the handle of a one-armed bandit.

“Lars is in my room sleeping,” I said. “I think he spent most of the night sitting outside in a deck chair.”

“Silly old fool,” Beverly murmured. “He'll probably catch his death of cold.”

“Don't you want to go talk to him?”

Beverly sniffed and dabbed at her nose with a lacy handkerchief she had fumbled out of her pocket. “I don't think so,” she said. “I'm just not ready to talk to him yet. I don't know what I'd say. In fact, I think I'll go back to the cabin and lie down for a while myself. The truth of the matter is, I didn't sleep very well last night, either.”