Nightshades

CHAPTER TWELVE

They started hammering questions at me as soon as they pulled me out of the water. What happened are you all right where’s Frank O’Daniel was it the fuel tank was there anybody else on board- a babble of words that seemed to rise and fall with the thrumming of the fire. Their faces were surreal masks of light and shadow, like participants in some sort of pagan ceremony. I shook my head at them, pushed their hands away. Stood there dripping: I wasn’t going to fall down.

“Call the sheriff.” The words came out all loose and funny, as if something had been broken or knocked out of kilter in my throat. “Somebody’s been killed.”

Buzz, buzz, thrum and buzz: Who was killed was it Frank God A’mighty I thought I saw something out there looked like an arm…

“Call the sheriff, will you? Call the sheriff!”

“Already been done, mister,” somebody said. It was the guy who had been shouting orders. “My wife’s taken care of it. They’re on the way.”

I said, “Okay,” and shoved past him, went away from all of them. I could walk all right, but my knees were wobbly and I took slow, careful steps, like a drunk trying to walk a straight line. In the firelight I could see that my clothing was scorched and waterlogged, hanging on me like strips of peeled skin. My face hurt; so did my hands, my arms. But it wasn’t that intolerable kind of fiery pain you feel when you’ve been badly burned. I touched my cheek: hot and wet and sore, but not raw, not blistered. Lucky. Jesus, I was lucky-that arm out there could have been mine…

There was a boat nearby, a small runabout, probably an outboard, with a tarp stretched over it and tied down. I sat on its gunwale and looked at the Kokanee. Not much left of it now. A floating pyre canted over to one side, lying low in the water, flames shooting through a gaping hole the explosion had ripped in its superstructure. Three guys with buckets were busy scooping water over the board floats down there, to make sure the fire didn’t spread to the rest of the boats. That was what the other guy, the one whose wife had telephoned the sheriff, had been shouting about while I was still in the lake. There wasn’t much else for anybody to do. You couldn’t even hope to put out a fire like that with a bucket brigade.

The take-charge guy came over to where I was sitting, the boozer I’d talked to earlier dogging along behind him. “You’d better come to my cabin,” he said, “get out of those wet clothes, get some salve on your burns.” He sounded pretty calm, as if boats blowing up and people getting killed were commonplace things to him. “I’ll call you a doctor.”

“Who’re you?”

“Tom Decker. I own the facilities here.”

The boozer said, “How could a thing like that happen? How the hell can a boat just blow up like that?”

“If you knew anything about boats, Les,” Decker said mildly, “you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”

“What kind of crack is that? I know plenty about boats.”

“Sure you do.” Decker shifted his gaze to me again. “If you don’t think you can make it under your own steam…”

“No, I’m okay. Not that badly hurt.”

He nodded. “But you don’t want to let burns go untreated,” he said. “Come on with me.”

I stood up again, giving the Kokanee another look. It would burn right down to the waterline in another few minutes, I thought. The sheriffs people would probably have to drag for what was left of O‘Daniel’s body. If it was O’Daniel whose arm was out there in the dark water.

I went with Decker, leaving the other guy, Les, to puzzle out the explosion by himself. Decker’s cabin was one of those in back and to one side of the cafe-and-store, and a slim, dark-haired woman was waiting in the doorway. He introduced her as his wife, Mary or Marie. Inside, they pointed me into the kitchen and Decker went and got some towels and an old bathrobe while she examined my face and arms. When he came back she disappeared, and I took the opportunity to shuck out of my wet clothing and dry off and bundle up in the robe.

Decker said, “Looks like your burns are superficial. But I’m going to call a doctor anyway.”

“Why?”

“You can never tell about burns. I’ve seen enough cases to know that they ought to be looked after right away by a competent medic.”

I studied him a little. He was about forty-five, lean, brown, with a long sad face and eyes that said he had stopped being excited about things a long time ago; eyes that had known pain. I had seen eyes like that before.

“Ex-military?” I asked him. “Vietnam?”

“Yes. I’ve got the look, right?”

“You’ve got the look.”

“You’ve got one too,” he said. “Police officer?”

“Private detective. I’m investigating the death of Frank O’Daniel’s partner, for their insurance company.”

He raised a questioning eyebrow. “Was O’Daniel on board the Kokanee when she blew?”

“Somebody was. He’s the most likely.”

“I read about the fire that killed Randall; O’Daniel talked about it some himself. Now this. Coincidence?”

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking: Two fatal “accidents” involving fire; two partners dying within a week of each other. Coincidence? Not too damned likely.

Decker’s wife came back with a tube of pinkish gunk and began to smooth the stuff over my face and the reddened surface of my arms and hands. It took most of the pain away instantly. Decker went to make another telephone call-presumably the doctor he’d mentioned. Through the cabin window I could see that the fire had died down some already: the orange stain had begun to fade out of the night.

When Decker rejoined us he said, “Doctor’ll be here in fifteen minutes or so.” I nodded, and he asked, “You want to talk about what happened out there?”

“I don’t know what happened, exactly. Maybe you can tell me.” I went on to explain how it had been: the smell of gasoline, the jangling noise, the pop and whoosh and the sudden explosion that had followed almost immediately.

He was frowning when I finished. “Doesn’t make much sense,” he said. “That ringing you heard-could it have been the telephone? O’Daniel had one of those battery-powered jobs-”

“No,” I said. “it wasn’t that kind of noise. Steady, no breaks in it.”

He shook his head. “I can’t think of anything he might’ve been doing that accounts for it. Or for those gas fumes. The man had plenty of faults but he was a good sailor. He knew boats.”

“Did he drink heavily?” I asked. “One of the people outside told me he bought a bottle earlier tonight.”

“Well, he drank more than some.”

“Did you sell him the bottle?”

“Yes. He’d had a couple of drinks but he wasn’t drunk.”

“That was about an hour before the explosion?”

“About.”

“How did he seem to you? What was his mood?”

“Cheerful. He seemed normal enough.”

“Was he alone when he came in?”

“Yes.”

“And alone on his boat today?”

“As far as I know.” He looked at his wife. “Marie?”

“I didn’t see him with anyone,” she said.

I asked, “Did he have any visitors this weekend?”

“Not that I saw,” she said, and Decker shook his head. “But we don’t pay much attention to what our renters do, as long as they don’t bother others.”

“Did he ever come here with anyone?”

“He used to bring his wife, but he hasn’t done that in a while.” Decker said, “Drunk or sober, why didn’t he smell the gasoline and do something about it? That’s what I’m wondering.”

“Me too,” I said. “What about the explosion? Does that sort of thing happen often?”

“It happens, but not usually with houseboats like the Kokanee.” He paused speculatively. “Still, she shouldn’t have made a boom like that. Shouldn’t have burned that hot, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“That was a hell of a big boom,” he said. “There shouldn’t have been enough gasoline or other flammables on board to blow with that much force. Or to make her burn as hot and fast as she did.”

“I see.”

“O’Daniel could have stored up flammables for some reason of his own,” Decker said. “People aren’t very bright sometimes. But it’s not likely.”

We looked at each other. I said, “Suppose it was no accident. Can you fit the facts into an explanation?”

“Sure, if it was suicide. But that’s a hell of a way to knock yourself off. And why would he want to take you with him?”

“No reason I can think of,” I said. “How about if it also wasn’t suicide? How about if it was murder?”

He spread his hands. “I can add up part of it that way, not all of it. Maybe I’m just slow, but I don’t see how it could be murder.”

“I must be slow too,” I said. “Neither do I.”

Two cars full of county sheriff’s deputies, and a fat and dour plainclothes investigator named Telford, showed up before long. So did the doctor Decker had called. Telford asked me questions while the doctor examined me and the deputies prowled around outside. Rehashing my account of things didn’t open up any new insights; nor did anything come out of the deputies’ questioning of the other Mountain Harbor renters. Nobody had seen or heard anything suspicious prior to the explosion, and nobody had any other information that might explain what had happened.

The doctor confirmed Decker’s and my opinion that my burns were superficial, and decided that the pinkish stuff Mrs. Decker had spread on me was all the medication I required. Telford decided my soggy identification was genuine, and that I had no apparent sinister motives, and could be released on my own recognizance. Come in to his office in Redding tomorrow and make a formal statement, he said. Good-bye, he said.

There wasn’t any reason for me to hang around there any longer; they weren’t going to get what was left of Frank O’Daniel out of the Kokanee for a while yet, maybe not until morning, and even if they did I had no desire to watch them do it. I borrowed an old pair of pants and a shirt from Decker, thanked him and his wife, bundled up my own stuff, and got out of there.

When I came into Kerry’s and my room at the Sportsman’s Rest it was after ten o’clock. She was lying on the bed reading a mystery novel by somebody named Muller. She took one look at me, made startled noises, threw the book aside, bounced off the bed, and said, “For God’s sake, what happened to you?” in a half-concerned, half-frightened voice-a reaction that made me feel loved again.

I told her what had happened to me. She didn’t like it; she never likes it when I have a brush with violence-not that I’m keen on it myself. But she settled down after a time and put her arms around me, and that was good in more ways than one because it meant she was over her pique and we were going to get on again. For a while, anyway.

I got a couple of minutes of cuddling. Then she let go of me and gave me a critical look, and a small smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Well,” she said, “at least one good thing came out of tonight.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Go look in the mirror.”

I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My face was mottled, still lobster-red in patches across both cheeks, greasy with Mrs. Decker’s pink gunk. And my upper lip was more or less naked.

“You see?” Kerry said from the doorway. “The explosion did what I’ve been yearning to do for weeks. It singed that stupid mustache right off.”