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.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Frank O‘Daniel was the person who’d died in the explosion, all right; I got the word on that Sunday morning, when I went to the sheriffs office in Redding to keep my promise to Telford. O’Daniel had been the only casualty. They’d found his charred remains in the Kokanee’s cockpit-and his blown-off arm floating around among the debris in the take-and they had identified him through his dental charts. An autopsy had been performed, but nothing had come of that-no indications of foul play.
“I don’t see how the coroner can stand his job,” Telford said. He shook his head, leaned back in his desk chair, and belched dyspeptically. “Must have been like trying to autopsy a piece of overcooked steak.”
Nice analogy, I thought. But I said, “Yeah, I guess. Have you notified Mrs. O’Daniel yet?”
“I just got back from talking to her a few minutes ago.”
“How did she take it?”
He grimaced. “The way they usually take it. Cried some and carried on.”
“Like he was the love of her life, huh? Like she can’t bear the thought of going on without him?”
“More or less.” Now he was frowning. “What’re you getting at?”
“It wasn’t that way between them,” I said, and I told him the things I’d found out about Helen O’Daniel and the other things I suspected-an affair with Munroe Randall, perhaps another one with Paul Robideaux.
Telford gave that some thought. Then he belched again, said ruefully, “My wife made a Spanish omelette with hot sauce for breakfast,” unwrapped a Rolaids tablet, chewed and swallowed it, and said, “You don’t think what happened at Mountain Harbor was an accident?”
“Let’s just say I’m suspicious. How does it look to you?”
“Suspicious,” he said, “but not enough to get me excited about it-yet. No evidence so far that says it was anything but an accident. Or how it could’ve been anything but an accident.”
“But you’re still working on it?”
“Oh, we’re real tenacious types up here in the sticks,” he said mildly. “We’re not too smart, but once we get our teeth into something we just don’t like to let go.”
“I’m like that too,” I said without missing a beat. “It’s a good way for a detective to be.”
