Lying in Wait (9780061747168) (3 page)

“You remember this guy, don't you, Else?” Alan continued. “Jonas Beaumont. He was just a little pipsqueak of a sophomore the year we were seniors, but he was already a damn fine basketball player. Give him the ball, and he could run and jump like a damn jackrabbit.”

Else Gebhardt looked up at me. “BoBo?” she said uncertainly.

It was the name that one year's batch of cheerleaders had stuck me with—a relic I had thought buried in my past right along with my given name of Jonas.

“That's right,” I admitted reluctantly. “BoBo Beaumont. It's me, all right.”

Although her bright blue eyes were wild with grief, Else Gebhardt smiled at me through her tears. Her hands sought mine. “Please, BoBo,” she pleaded. “Just let me on the boat long enough to see if it's Gunter. I have to know.”

“I'm not sure you should go anywhere near it,” I answered dubiously. “The man on board—if he is your husband—has been burned very badly. You may not even be able to recognize him.”

“I'll recognize him all right,” she said determinedly.

In the end, we compromised. At my direction, the two uniformed officers reluctantly allowed both Else Gebhardt and Alan Torvoldsen past the crime-scene perimeter and onto the dock. I figured there wasn't that much of a problem. It didn't seem the least bit likely that Janice Morraine would allow Gunter Gebhardt's widow access to the burned-out boat, and I was right about that. Janice didn't.

While Else waited on the dock, Janice Morraine brought one of Nancy Gresham's police photos over to the side of the boat. The grisly Polaroid close-up she handed over to Else showed nothing but the dead man's face. For a long moment after Janice placed the small color photo in Else's hand, she didn't look down at it. Once she was actually holding the proof she had demanded, it seemed as
though she couldn't quite summon the courage to look at it.

At last, though, she dropped her gaze and held the picture out far enough from her so she could see it clearly. Time seemed to stand still on the dock. There was no sound at all and no movement. Then Else Gebhardt's features seemed to fall out of focus, and she fainted dead away.

Luckily, Alan Torvoldsen was there to catch her. I'm not sure anyone of the rest of us could have managed. None of the rest of us were strong enough—with the possible exception of Marian Rockwell.

Women don't
seem to faint as much as they used to, at least not as much as they did in the old black-and-white movies my mother watched on TV once she was too sick to sew anymore. She spent countless sleepless nights in the company of one late movie after another.

And in those old thirties movies, when one of those pencil-thin female stars keeled over, there was always a strong leading man to catch her on the way down and deposit her on the nearest bed or couch, depending upon whether or not they were married at the time. My guess, though, is that none of those silver-screen beauties weighed nearly as much as Else Gebhardt.

The woman stood six-something in her stocking feet. Stark naked, she would have outweighed me by a good thirty to forty pounds. She outweighed Alan Torvoldsen, too, especially considering the full-length wool coat, but Champagne Al didn't seem to notice. He simply swept her up into his arms and strode off down the dock. Janice Morraine bent down and retrieved the picture before the wind blew the photo into the water, while I trailed off after Alan and Else.

“Where are you taking her?” I asked.

“To my boat,” Alan grunted. “She needs a place to lie down.”

“How far is it?” I asked.

His jaw stiffened with exertion and effort. “Just over there,” he said, motioning with his head toward the next dock. “It's not far.”

Maybe not as the crow flies, it wasn't far. Hitting a tennis ball, from one dock to another, even I could have managed it. But for a man carrying more than his own weight, down half the length of one dock and halfway up the other, it was a hell of a long way. Still, that's one thing I remember about Champagne Al from way back before he even had that name. He was always stubborn as hell. Stubborn and tough.

By the time we started up the other dock, beads of sweat popped out on Alan's brow. Else had come to and was already arguing. “Put me down,” she insisted. “I'm all right. I can walk.”

“I'll put you down when I'm good and ready,” Alan Torvoldsen replied.

He finally stopped in front of one of the ugliest excuses for a fishing boat I had ever seen. Instead of the graceful old Torvoldsen family schooner
Norwegian Princess
, this was an old steel-hulled, T-Boat-class army lighter trying to pass itself off as a respectable member of the fishing fleet. The name of the boat was newly lettered on the stern—
One Day at a Time
. That name told me a whole lot about where Champagne Al might be coming from as well as where he'd been during the almost thirty years between then and the time when we'd been schoolmates together at Ballard High.

“Here,” he said, setting the protesting Else down on her feet and turning to me. By then his whole face was drenched in sweat. Rivulets rolled down the back of his bald head and neck. He took off the cap and scrubbed away the perspiration with the sleeve of his shirt. “You hold on to her until I hop aboard,” he ordered. “Then we'll both help her over the rail.”

“I don't need any help,” Else asserted, but she wasn't able to deliver. As soon as she tried to move under her own power, the wooziness returned, and once again she leaned against Alan for support.

In the end, it took both of us to help her climb aboard
One Day at a Time
. As he led her toward the galley aft of the pilothouse, I heard Alan Torvoldsen mumble something about “…one stubborn damn woman.”

And although the remark was true as far as Else was concerned, I don't think Alan Torvoldsen had a whole lot of room to talk.

I climbed aboard and followed both of them into the galley, where I found Else Gebhardt seated on a narrow bench beside a tiny, bolted-down, Formica-topped table. She sat there with her elbows resting on the table and her hands clasped tightly to her face. It looked to me as though she was using her hands and fingers to physically hold back tears.

Without a word, Alan opened a locked cabinet with a key and took out a bottle of aquavit. Silently, he poured a generous shot into a glass and then placed it on the table next to Else's right elbow. Then he turned to me, one eyebrow raised and questioning.

I remember trying some of that potent stuff long ago. I know the heart-pounding, head-zinging rush. Even back in my most capable drinking days, I couldn't handle aquavit. “None for me,” I said. “I'm working.”

Champagne Al nodded sagely, returned the bottle to the cabinet, and turned the key in the lock.

“Drink it, Else,” he told her kindly. “You need it.”

But when Else Didricksen Gebhardt dropped her hands away from her face, there were no tears visible. Strangely enough, her grief seemed beyond tears. Shock works that way sometimes. Her face was pale, verging on gray, and the fierce blue light in her eyes had faded. She stared dully at the shot glass of liquor without making any effort to pick it up, almost without recognizing what it was.

“How is it possible?” she murmured. “Who would do such a thing?”

If she was expecting an audible answer to either of those two rhetorical questions, none was forthcoming—not from Champagne Al, and not from me, either.

Turning his back to her, Alan fiddled with the control on the galley stove, removed the cover plate, and then waited. When the well in the bottom of the stove filled with fuel, he lit one end of a twisted-up paper towel and used that to light the stove. Once satisfied that the fire was properly started, he replaced the cover, set a grimy coffeepot to heat, then turned back to Else, who had yet to touch her glass.

Alan studied her for some time but said nothing. Finally, he plucked a pack of cigarettes from his
pocket, withdrew one smoke, and lit it with a wooden match he struck on his pants leg. He dropped the used match into a chipped, broken-handled coffee mug that was filled to within an inch of the top with an accumulation of ashes, spent matches, and dead cigarette butts.

Leaning impassively against the sink, Alan exhaled a plume of unfiltered Camel cigarette smoke that quickly filled the small galley. He seemed disinclined to say anything at all to break what was fast becoming an unnervingly long silence.

“I finally got Gunter to stop smoking,” Else whispered sadly. “That seems pretty silly now, doesn't it? Stopping smoking may prevent lung cancer, but it doesn't make much difference if someone decides to murder you.”

With no more warning than that, Else Gebhardt's tears returned. When two of them slipped silently onto the table, she quickly wiped them away. Meanwhile, Alan Torvoldsen remained oddly silent. It seemed as though the effort of carrying Else from one dock to the other had somehow robbed him of the ability to speak. Or the need.

“He was a good man, Alan,” Else continued softly, her glance searching Alan's impassive face. “Gunter was a lot like you, you know,” she added. “I've always been sorry about what happened. I'm sorry you two could never be friends. I think you would have liked him.”

Alan Torvoldsen's eyes narrowed in a look that might have been anger or anguish, I couldn't tell which, and the fleeting expression disappeared before I had a chance to catalog it. With his eyes
once more carefully veiled, he stared off over the disheveled graying hair on Else's once-blond head. His distant gaze seemed to drill a hole deep into the smoke-yellowed, years-old pinup calendar tacked to the bulkhead above and behind her.

The stark, empty expression on his face wasn't suitable for casual indoor use, or for mixed company, either. It came uncomfortably close to the thousand-yard stare I've seen occasionally on the faces of Vietnam vets who are going down for the count, unfortunate losers who are trapped in that crazed, memory-filled catch-all mental health professionals call Delayed Stress Syndrome.

Forgotten between his fingers, Alan's smoldering cigarette dribbled a trail of gray ashes across the already ash-strewn galley floor. When he noticed it finally, he shook the rest off into the mug-turned-ashtray he still held in his other hand.

“We won't ever know that now, will we, Else, so you could just as well forget it,” he returned darkly. “Drink your drink.”

The comment seemed blunt and unkind, and it was barked out more as a command than an invitation. Else's fingers inched uncertainly toward the glass. When her fingertips finally touched it, she looked up at him. “I'm sorry it happened,” she said, “but thank you.”

The words she spoke seemed strangely out of whack with what I thought was going on. It was as though she was talking about something else entirely—something that had nothing to do with either her husband's death or with the brimming shot glass sitting on the table in front of her.

It took a moment for me to put the pieces to
gether. Embarrassed, I wondered if I hadn't inadvertently stumbled in on a private moment of loss and reconciliation that had been some thirty years in the making. It sounded as though Else was apologizing for marrying Gunter Gebhardt years before instead of Alan Torvoldsen.

Caught in that unexpected crossfire of intimacy in the cramped, smoke-filled galley, I felt suddenly isolated and invisible. It seemed as though the other two people had completely forgotten my presence. I was about to clear my throat to remind them when, as if on cue, the water in the coffeepot came to a sudden noisy boil. The rattling pot provided a much-needed diversion, shattering the moment and disrupting whatever it was that had passed between them.

When Alan turned to tend to the pot, Else picked up the glass and drained the generous shot in a single gulp. Her throat worked convulsively to swallow the burning liquid. Moments after she did so, her unnaturally pale face was suffused in a warm pink glow as the powerful alcohol blasted its way into her system.

“I should warn you,” Else said. “I don't hold my liquor very well. It might set me off.”

“That's all right,” Alan said. “Crying's good for you.”

He had taken two chipped but still usable coffee mugs down from the cupboard. He filled them with boiling water, spooned instant coffee into them, stirred thoughtfully, then handed one across the tiny table to me before picking up his own, proving once and for all that he hadn't forgotten my presence.

But his eyes settled on Else. “Especially at a time like this,” he added. “When something terrible happens, everybody needs to cry.”

One Day at a Time
listed suddenly to one side. A quick tattoo of footsteps pounded across the deck. “Detective Beaumont,” Officer Tamaguchi called from outside. “Are you in there?”

“Yo,” I answered. “What's up?”

“We've got some kind of hit-and-run,” he announced, when I opened the door, letting a burst of November chill into the stove-warmed galley. “It evidently happened earlier this morning—before the fire was reported. Sergeant Watkins seems to think the accident may be related to the fire. He wants you and Detective Danielson to get on it right away and check it out.”

Alan was already sipping his coffee. The man's lips must have been made of asbestos. The liquid in my cup was still far too hot to drink. Reluctantly, I put my untouched steaming mug down on the table.

“I'll have to take a rain check,” I said to Alan. “I've gotta go.”

“That's fine,” Alan said, waving at me with his cigarette.

I looked at Else. As far as I was concerned, Gunter Gebhardt's widow was no longer Mrs. Gebhardt. She was, instead, Else Didriksen—a schoolmate of mine, a former cheerleader who had once urged a long-legged, awkward kid called BoBo Beaumont on to basketball-court glory. That was back at a time when we had all thought our futures would be very different from the way they actually turned out to be.

“Else,” I said. “I'll need to get in touch with you later. How can I reach you?”

Putting one hand deep into the pocket of her long wool coat, she pulled out a set of car keys and a wrinkled business card. She laid the keys on the table next to her empty glass, then handed me the card. On it was written the words, “Else Gebhardt, Consultant.” That and a phone number was all.

“What kind of consultant?” I asked, as I pocketed the card.

“Seafood,” she answered with a self-deprecating shrug. “What else would it be?”

What else indeed? “Look, Else,” I said. “When you're ready to go home, one of the officers will be happy to give you a lift.”

“I'm fine,” Else said. “I can drive myself home.”

“No, you can't,” Alan replied.

“Why not?” Else argued with a sudden stubborn jut of her chin.

With a deft movement, Alan reached across the table in front of her, snatched up the keys, and stuffed them in his shirt pocket.

“Because I said so,” he answered. “Because you've been drinking.” He turned to me. “When she's ready to go, I'll see to it that she gets home.”

His manner of saying it made it clear that he meant every word. And considering the effect I remembered from drinking aquavit, not driving anywhere under its influence was probably a damned good idea. I gave that point to Champagne
Al. One missing ducktail wasn't all that had changed about him.

When I started back out on deck, Else stayed where she was while Alan walked with me as far as the rail. “She'll be all right,” he said.

I don't know which one of us he was trying to convince, me or himself.

“Where will you be?” I asked. “Give me your address in case I need to get back to you as well.”

“This is the only address I have,” he answered.

“You're living here on the boat? In the dead of winter?”

“It beats the hell out of where I was living before,” he said.

I looked around at the ragtag wreck of a boat. I'm sure my skepticism showed.

Alan Torvoldsen grinned and flipped his cigarette butt over the side into the water. “If you think this is bad,” he said, “you ought to try living on the streets.” And with that, Alan hurried back inside the galley, closing the door behind him.