Huckleberry Finished (5 page)

Like Logan Rafferty, I thought as the man himself came back along the corridor.

“The cops will be here in a few minutes,” he announced.

Captain Williams frowned at me. “I didn't care for the tone of those questions you were asking, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “You seem to think that a member of my crew could be responsible for what happened to Mr. Webster.”

“Well, you've got to admit it's a possibility,” I said. “Shoot, right now everybody on the boat's a suspect, isn't that right?”

“There are close to a hundred passengers on board,” Williams said, his voice cool. “Webster was a passenger. I'd say that's where you'll find the killer.”

“
I
don't plan on findin' the killer,” I said. “That's a job for the police.”

And I sure hoped that it worked out that way this time.

A
s Rafferty had predicted, it didn't take long for the cops to show up. Captain Williams sent one of the crew members up to the main deck to wait for them to arrive and bring them down here. The steward came back a few minutes later with a woman in plain clothes and two uniformed men following him.

The woman took the lead, saying, “Captain Williams? I'm Detective Charlotte Travis from the Hannibal Police Department.”

She was a few years younger than me, around thirty-five, I guessed. Thick blond hair hung to her shoulders. She was pretty but didn't try to make anything out of it. That wouldn't stop men from looking at her appreciatively, though. Rafferty sure did.

Williams shook hands with her and introduced himself. “Captain L. B. Williams, Detective. This is my head of security, Logan Rafferty.” He nodded toward the big man.

“Yes, I actually spoke to Mr. Rafferty when he placed the nine-one-one call. The dispatcher transferred his call to me.”

I suspected that Hannibal had a fairly small police department. That was probably why the 911 dispatcher had contacted Detective Travis first, rather than sending out some uniformed officers to the scene and letting them call in the detective, as it would have been done in a bigger city.

Williams introduced the other crew members who were there, then said, “And this is Ms. Delilah Dickinson.”

Travis looked curiously at me. “Do you work on the riverboat, too, Ms. Dickinson?”

“No, I'm a travel agent,” I told her. “Mr. Webster booked his cruise through my agency, and I'm leading the tour.”

“Then what are you doing here?” the detective asked me with a frown. “Did you discover the body?”

“No, that was Henry here,” Williams said.

Travis shook her head. “There are too many people here.” She turned to the uniformed officers who'd accompanied her. “Take everybody except the captain and the man who discovered the body and hold them somewhere else for the time being, until I send for them.”

“Wait just a minute,” Rafferty protested. “I'm the head of security. I ought to be here.”

“You will be when I'm ready to talk to you,” Travis said. “Until then, maybe your office would be a good place for you and the rest of these people to wait.”

Rafferty didn't like it, but after a second he gave a surly shrug. The cops shepherded us back along the corridor and up two sets of stairs to the deck where the security office was located.

As we went through the room where the video monitors were located, I asked Rafferty, “Are there any security cameras below decks?”

“You mean in the corridor where that storage closet is?” He shook his head. “Most of our video coverage is of the casino.”

That came as no surprise. The casino was where the money was, after all.

“You've got to have some cameras out on deck, though,” I said.

He grunted. “You ask too many questions.”

As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I was curious about what happened to Ben Webster, of course, and it bothered me that somebody had killed one of my clients. I thought that was a natural enough reaction. But it wasn't my job to find the killer, I reminded myself again.

Still, I glanced at the monitors as the cops took us through to Rafferty's office, just to get an idea of which areas on the boat the cameras covered.

The office was crowded with six people in it, especially when one of them was Rafferty. The cops told us to sit down and wait, but there weren't that many chairs. I didn't feel much like sitting, anyway, so I wound up crossing my arms and pacing back and forth. I couldn't even do that well, since there wasn't much room to pace.

Rafferty looked at me from behind his desk and said, “You don't think I had anything to do with that kid getting killed, do you?”

Before I could answer—and I wasn't sure what I would have said, anyway—one of the cops held up a finger and said, “No talking about the case. Detective Travis wouldn't like that.”

Rafferty snorted. “What, you think we have to get our stories straight or something?”

“I can tell you this much,” I said to the cop. “Mr. Rafferty and I aren't likely to be conspiring together on anything.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Rafferty said. He didn't have to add that the feeling was dislike.

The two stewards, if that's what they were, just looked uncomfortable. I'm not normally a hostile person, but something about Logan Rafferty brought out the worst in me, I guess.

We waited in silence for a while after that. It got on my nerves, and it must have bothered Rafferty, too. He grinned at the uniformed officers and said, “That Detective Travis is sort of hot, isn't she, boys?”

One of the cops cleared his throat and looked away. The other one just stonily ignored Rafferty. That seemed like a pretty good policy to me.

Finally the radio attached to one cop's belt squawked. He answered the call, and I heard Travis order, “Bring Mr. Rafferty down here.”

The cop actually said, “Ten-four,” and hung his radio back on its belt clip. He nodded to Rafferty and jerked a thumb toward the door. “Let's go.”

That left the other cop watching me and the two stewards. It was a good thing we weren't desperate criminals, I thought.

Rafferty was gone for a long time. I was getting bored, and worse, I was hungry. Those appetizers I'd grabbed in the dining room hadn't lasted long. I guess seeing a dead body and fainting had burned off all the champagne, too. If I felt light-headed now, it was from being famished. I've always had a healthy appetite. Most petite Southern ladies do, once you get to know them.

I didn't expect to get anything to eat anytime soon, though. The murder investigation was more important than a growling stomach. I worried that Detective Travis would want to question the two stewards before she got around to me, and that it would be the middle of the night or later before she was done with me.

But when the cop brought Rafferty back to the office, he pointed at me and said, “You're next, ma'am. If you'll come with me…?”

I didn't even try to ask him any questions on our way below decks. I knew he wouldn't answer them.

I was sort of hoping that Ben Webster's body had been taken away by now, but when we reached the corridor I saw that it was still stuffed into the storage closet. Crime scene technicians in Missouri State Police uniforms were photographing it and scouring the area around the door for evidence. Travis had moved back well away from the scene. Captain Williams was gone. I supposed that Travis had finished questioning him and told him to go back to running the boat. Not that there was probably much that needed to be done while we were docked, I thought.

“Ms. Dickinson,” Travis began, “you're the owner and operator of Dickinson Literary Tours?” She had an open notebook in her hand, but she didn't consult it before asking me the question.

“That's right. I have a couple of employees, but it's my agency.”

“Are either of those employees here on the
Southern Belle
?”

I shook my head. “No, they're back at the office in Atlanta. Well, they're not there right now, you understand, since it's, what, nearly midnight?”

She didn't directly respond to that, just said, “So you're handling this tour by yourself?”

“That's right. It's a relatively small tour, only about forty clients, and the arrangements were simple. There's really not that much that can go—”

I stopped, and for a second I thought Detective Travis might smile. But she didn't. She said, “You were about to say there's not much that can go wrong, weren't you?”

“Yeah.” I shook my head and tried not to look toward the little closet where Ben Webster's body was. “Boy, I was wrong about that, wasn't I?”

“Tell me about Mr. Webster. Did you know him before he signed up to come on this tour?”

“No. I never even talked to him before lunch today, back in St. Louis. He booked the trip using our Web page.”

“You have all his information, I suppose? Credit card number, address, phone, all that?”

I nodded. “It's on my computer. Well, his credit card info isn't. It's on the office computer. But I can network with it and get the info if you want.”

“Maybe later. Isn't it sort of unusual for a young man like Mr. Webster to be traveling alone, especially on a literary tour like this one?”

“Not really. I get clients like that pretty often. Anyway, the Mark Twain angle isn't the only draw on the boat. I'm sure a lot of people just come for the gambling.”

“Oh, yes,” Travis said. “The gambling. Any trouble there?”

I took a deep breath. I didn't have any reason to withhold the truth from her. And for all I knew, both Rafferty and Captain Williams had already told her all about it. If I didn't mention the incident that had occurred that afternoon, Travis was bound to wonder why.

Of course, if Williams and Rafferty
hadn't
said anything about what happened, then Travis might be suspicious of them once I brought it up.

But that was their lookout, not mine, so I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, there
was
some trouble,” and proceeded to tell her about it in as much detail as I could remember.

I couldn't read her face, couldn't tell if this was the first time she had heard the story or the third. She made some notes as I talked. When I was finished she asked, “Do you know the name of the man at the roulette wheel whom Mr. Webster accused of cheating?”

I shook my head. “No, I'm afraid not. But I'm sure the captain or Mr. Rafferty can tell you.”
If they haven't already,
I thought.

“So after the meeting in Mr. Rafferty's office, you escorted Mr. Webster back to his cabin?”

Now I had to make up my mind. I didn't want to keep the truth from the police, even if it made me look a little foolish, so I said, “Not exactly.”

For the first time, I saw a spark of real interest in Travis's eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean the rascal pulled a trick on me.” I felt bad about calling him a rascal as soon as I said it, so I hurried on, “I mean, Mr. Webster led me to believe that the cabin he went to was the one assigned to him, but it really wasn't.”

“All right, that's not clear to me. He went into someone else's cabin?”

“No,” I said. “He stopped outside the door of Cabin Seventeen and
told
me it was his cabin, but he didn't go in just then, and I didn't wait to watch him go in. I left him there, just outside the door.”

“How do you know it wasn't his cabin?”

“Because I went back there later looking for him, and I ran into the man who really has the cabin.”

“What's his name?”

I hated to get Vince Mallory mixed up in this, but I didn't see that I had any choice. Besides, Detective Travis could get the information in a matter of minutes by asking the captain or Rafferty.

“Vince Mallory,” I said.

“Is he one of your clients as well?”

“Yes, he booked the tour through my agency.”

“Were you acquainted with him before the cruise?”

“Nope. I mean, no.”

“Another man traveling alone?”

“Yes, but in this case, I know why. He's a history and literature buff. Most of the clients who go on my tours are. In this case, Mr. Mallory is very interested in Mark Twain. He's going to write his doctoral dissertation on Twain.”

At least, he was if he decided to go back to grad school, I thought. It seemed like a reasonable enough assumption.

Detective Travis said, “Do you have any idea why Mr. Webster would pretend that was his cabin when it really wasn't?”

“No. The only thing I can figure out was that he did it so I wouldn't be able to find him when I came looking for him.”

“Why would he think you'd be looking for him later?”

“Well…he wouldn't. Unless he was already planning not to get off the boat when it docked at Hannibal.”

That was pure speculation on my part, of course, but Detective Travis didn't seem bothered by it. She wrote some more in her notebook, then said, “You think he wasn't really going to take the deal Mr. Rafferty offered him. He planned to cause some sort of trouble instead.”

Those weren't actually questions, but I said, “That's what it looks like.”

“But he didn't confide his plans to you.”

I shook my head with some emphasis this time. “No, ma'am, he did not. If he had, I would've stayed right with him, grabbed him by the ear, and dragged him off the boat when we got here.”

I would've done it, too.

Again I thought for a second that Detective Travis was going to smile. Instead she said, “You didn't see him after that?”

“No, ma'am. I looked for him when I saw he didn't get off the boat with the rest of the passengers, but I never found him.”

“Where did you look?”

“All the areas on all three decks where passengers are allowed. I knocked on the door of his actual cabin, because I'd gotten the number of it from the passenger manifest that was e-mailed to me.”

“Which cabin is that?”

I gave her the number. She made a note of it, then asked, “Did you try the door of that cabin to see if it was unlocked?”

“Uh, yeah, I did,” I admitted. “But I knocked first and called out to him. He didn't answer. I didn't figure the door would be unlocked, but I tried the knob anyway.”

And my fingerprints were all over that knob, I thought, as well as numerous other places in the cabin. It's a good thing I wasn't a professional criminal. I don't reckon I'd last a week.

I sort of hoped that Travis wouldn't follow up on that response, but naturally, she did. “Was the door unlocked?”

“It was.”