Voyage into Violence (10 page)

Pam shook her head.

“I won't,” Mrs. Macklin said, “be molested. Not any more. I'm not defenseless. They—”

Then, suddenly, she stopped and merely looked at Pam.

“I'm sure—” Pam began, and then Mrs. Macklin smiled. The smile was narrow in the tightness of her face, but it was friendly. Her voice, when she spoke, was quite a different voice.

“I shouldn't bother you with my troubles,” she said. “I'm afraid I'm a little upset. Making a mountain out of a molehill. She says I am.”

“Your daughter?” Pam said.

“Of course, dear,” Olivia Macklin said, “my daughter. So patient with her flighty old mother.”

From what Pam had seen of them together, what she saw now of Mrs. Macklin, Pam thought Hilda Macklin would have need of patience. Pam said, “Mmmm,” which is a small sound that covers much.

“You don't know where the detective is, then?” Mrs. Macklin said. Pamela North shook her head. “When you see him, tell him I'm looking for him,” Mrs. Macklin said, and nodded her head briskly. She wore a scarf over it—a pink scarf, her hair a fringe of red under it. “You'll do that?”

“Of course,” Pam said.

Mrs. Macklin got up and went away. She moved resolutely. She did not walk as if she had been drinking.

After she had gone, Pam continued to sit erect on the deck chair for a moment. Then she dropped her robe behind her and walked the few paces on the gently moving deck to the swimming pool, and went into it. The water was cool, then it was tepid. Pam swam from end to end, and from end to end again, and stood at the shallow end and watched Hilda Macklin dive smoothly in at the deeper. She was certainly a different girl in a bathing suit, Pam thought, and watched with admiration. I do splash a lot, Pam thought. By comparison. She swam to the deep end of the pool and climbed the ladder, and looked back at Hilda, who was gliding. That was the only word for it.

Pam went to her chair, and her towel and robe. She wondered absently where the others were, and supposed Bill to be, in some fashion, at constabulary duty, and Dorian sketching and Jerry—Jerry had probably gone to their room to lie down. She decided to go and see and that it was, in any case, almost time to change for lunch. She went down the stairs to A Deck, and along the passageway to their stateroom, and found the door unlocked and went into it.

Jerry was not there. There was no one there.

Pam slid out of her bathing suit and regarded herself in the long mirror. From a distance, she thought, anyone might think I was still wearing the suit, what there is of it. When I get home, I'll have to get a sun lamp to even things out.

Carrying the wet bathing suit—what there was of it—Pam went across the stateroom toward the compact bath. The narrow door to the bath was closed. Pam opened it and at the same time flicked the switch, outside, which would send power through a fluorescent tube—make it first sputter, then flicker, then glow brightly. She would hang the—

The tube began to splutter. At that instant, hands came out of the small bath compartment. Pam was conscious of the hands as something moving—then as hands—then, while the light still flickered in the darkness, did not yet reveal who was hidden there, she was at the mercy of the hands. They whirled her around. She was thrust away by the hands, so that she staggered. Then she seemed to leave the floor as the hands, gripping her upper arms, hurled her across the stateroom.

Pam North sailed—could feel herself sailing. And she landed on one of the beds. She heard herself say, “
Uh!
” as the breath went out of her.

But she twisted quickly on the bed to face the danger.

There was no danger. There was merely a door—the door from stateroom to passageway—closing quickly.

Pam blinked and started to get up, and looked around the room and continued to look around it.

She saw what she had not seen before—that one of the drawers of the dressing table was partly open; that the door of one of the wardrobes stood open, too, and that clothing had been pushed on hangers to either end. Her white dinner dress—her
white
one—was lying on the floor. It would be the white one, and Pam went to pick it up.

Pam had the dress on its hanger, was herself half in the wardrobe and shielded partly by the open door, when she heard the sound of the catch being released on the door from passageway into stateroom.

He was coming back!

Pam looked for a weapon. She stooped and grabbed an evening slipper—a slipper with a high, leather heel. It would be better than nothing, Pam thought, and stood ready, shielding herself behind the wardrobe door, holding the shoe as a weapon.

Surprise, Pam thought—that's my only chance. The man's strong—he's proved that. He—

He came through the door into the stateroom. Pam, holding the slipper high, had leaped before she looked—had leaped and could not stop herself.

Jerry threw up a quick hand, caught the slipper before it caught his head. With the other arm he caught the quick, naked body of his wife.

“You,” Jerry said, “are certainly impetuous today.” He kicked the stateroom door closed behind him. “But,” Jerry said, “why the shoe?”

The Norths' stateroom had been searched. So had the adjacent stateroom of the Weigands. The search apparently had, in both cases, been quick, as if some object of considerable size had been sought—some object which could not be concealed under, for example, a stack of Jerry's handkerchiefs. But in both rooms lingerie had been tumbled; in both shirts had been turned over and, in the case of Bill Weigand's, the laundry cardboard had been removed from all but one.

The searcher had gone first through the Weigands' room, Bill thought. There there had been no interruption; there drawers had been opened and closed again, although there had been no real effort to hide the fact—except from a first casual glance—that a search had been made. Pam had, evidently, interrupted the search of her room. Trapped, the intruder had been forced to drop what he was doing and take refuge. The action was one of a badly rattled man; that it had worked to his advantage was, from his point of view, merely preposterously good luck.

The hands had been a man's hands, with a man's strength behind them. Of that, Pam North was certain. Beyond that, she could not really go.

“They looked enormous,” she told Bill. “Great, hideous, groping things. But of course I was—I was rather surprised. Here I am all—all ready for a bath and and—
this
comes out of the dark. But actually, I suppose, they were just ordinary hands.”

She could not really describe them further. If there had been a ring on one of the hands, or on both—if there had been a wrist watch on one or an identification bracelet on the other—well, such things would be helpful to know about. But Pam did not know.

“He turned me around,” Pam said. “He—it felt as if he threw me. Of course, all he did was push.” She paused. “Why only that?” she asked. “When he slugged the poor baby?”

“Chivalry,” Dorian suggested. “He could see you—weren't a man.”

“He certainly could,” Pam said, and felt that it would be an appropriate moment to blush prettily. She waited momentarily and did not feel a proper blush. I don't blush as well as I used to, Pam thought, and sighed momentarily over lessened innocence. “He was after the things,” she said then, more practically.

There could be no doubt he was after the “things,” which was to say the effects of the late J. Orville Marsh. It had been somewhat naïve of him to think that they would have been left lying in either stateroom. They were in the purser's safe. It could only be assumed that, among the “things,” there was at least one important enough to make worth while the taking of any chance, however remote.

“He took long ones,” Jerry said.

Bill said, “Right,” to that, and then added that the chances were not quite so long as superficially appeared. With a ship to roam, with sun to sit in, few people spend much time in staterooms, which are for the changing of clothes, the sleeping away of nights.

“Also,” Bill said, “he'd probably seen us all out and around—you swimming, Pam; Jerry walking the deck; Dorian sketching on the sun deck.”

“And you?” Dorian said.

“Talking to people,” Bill said. “The surgeon's pretty sure young Pinkham's begun to come around—the kid's begun to babble a bit. The stewardess who found Marsh didn't see anybody behaving strangely in passageways. There's no name on the passenger list which means anything in particular to me—except Barron's. Riggs and Adjutant Jones bear Folsom out about the sword. Nobody heard the gun case being opened after midnight, although it's under—or approximately under—the windows of several staterooms. In other words—”

He was interrupted. The public-address system soothingly requested “the following to communicate with the purser—Captain and Mrs. William Weigand, Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Furstenberg; Mr. Jules Barron, Mr. Hammond Jones; Mr. J. R. Folsom.” The public-address system thanked the ship as a whole and clicked.

“Cocktails with the captain,” Bill said. He looked at Pam. “All he has room for at one time,” Bill said.

“Humh,” Pam said. “And after all the trouble I've gone to. Getting half killed. To say nothing of the risk to—”

“My head,” Jerry finished for her, somewhat hurriedly.

6

The radiogram from Sergeant Stein, who had made considerable progress under circumstances which were adverse, confirmed, amplified and in some instances supplied new information. The value of the new information—and for that matter of the confirmations, the amplifications—was uncertain. Presumably, Bill Weigand thought, reading Stein's message, time would tell. Not that it always did.

Mr. and Mrs. Carl Buckley, the young couple at the captain's table—why at the captain's table? Memo to enquire—were from Emporia, Kansas. They had spent Thursday night at the Hotel Statler in New York. In Emporia, Mr. Buckley, and his father, operated The New York Haberdashery. Probably, this would eventually be filed under “Useless Information.” A good many things were.

Mrs. Macklin—Mrs. Olivia Macklin—lived in New York at a residential hotel, but had lived there only for a little over two weeks. She had registered as from St. Petersburg, Florida. She had, when engaging her room—not one of the more expensive, but by most standards expensive enough—indicated her intention of staying through the winter. But on the previous Wednesday, she had reported a change in plans, and had checked out Friday morning—at 10:17—in time to go aboard the
Carib Queen
. Her daughter had not stayed with her at the hotel. The hotel had no knowledge whatever of a Miss Hilda Macklin.

Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Furstenberg occupied a large apartment in a large building on Central Park West. He had retired as a designer of jewelry three years ago; as a designer he had for many years been associated with a Fifth Avenue firm. For some years thereafter he had had his own shop on an upper floor of a building in East Fifty-seventh Street. “Very high class,” Stein reported. The Furstenbergs were childless. He was around seventy; she a few years younger. They traveled a good deal.

The message added, in regard to Jules Barron, some amplification of Stein's telephoned report. Barron was a ballroom dancer, by no means a famous one. He had had no recent engagements. He was frequently seen elegantly—or at least smoothly—escorting women who tended to be older, and certainly richer, than he. The suspicion that he had other activities had been aroused only on the one occasion, and nothing had come of that. He was believed to have been born Finnegan, in Hoboken, although he was Latin in appearance. He had at one time been an instructor in one of a chain of dancing schools.

J. R. Folsom, elected Captain of the Ancient and Respectable Riflemen—an organization centering in Worcester, Massachusetts, and precisely what Folsom had said it was—was treasurer of the Worcester Paper Box Company, which had been founded by his father—R. J. Folsom. He was, as far as a quick check—and one made at night, and early Sunday morning—revealed, esteemed in the community. He was a director of the Community Chest. He was a member of the Clover Club, which was in Worcester.

Walter D. Riggs, insurance and real estate, and Hammond Jones (Buicks) also were members of the Clover Club. They were esteemed in the community. Mr. Jones had been vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Riggs was prominent in Rotary. They, like Folsom, were married, lived in substantial houses, and had begotten children.

And as to Marsh—

Marsh came last. There was quite a good deal of information about J. Orville Marsh, some of it merely confirming what, about Marsh, Bill Weigand already knew. Marsh was duly licensed; he had always kept his nose clean. For years he had done no divorce work. He had several times co-operated with the police, once when he had not needed to. He had never, before, got in the way—which is all that a police department can expect from a licensed private detective. There was no indication that he was in the jewelry recovery racket; he had not, of course, ever been concerned in a murder case. And, whatever he had said, he was not retired.

This had taken a little finding out. He had a small office in a good office building, with only his name on the door. There were several filing cases in it, all locked. Through the contents of the cases, two men were going slowly, carefully. They had so far found nothing to alter the official view of Marsh's activities, or nothing which seemed immediately pertinent to Marsh's death. (But what was pertinent and what was not could only be guessed at. From his distance, from the stateroom on the
Carib Queen
where Bill waited for Dorian to finish dressing, Bill could not even guess.)

Marsh's secretary, and his only employee, lived in Brooklyn. She was thin and gray and fifty-five, and had been Marsh's secretary for twenty years. Told Marsh was dead, her eyes had gone blank, as if she had been struck. But she had steadied herself quickly. She had then been precise and careful—so precise, so careful, that much patience was required of Stein, who had done this one himself, and Detective O'Grady, working with him. Bill Weigand could read this between the lines. She had been insistent on the confidential aspect of Marsh's trade; on her obligation to preserve that confidence. So, it was by no means certain that she had told them all she knew, or all that might prove pertinent.