said.
The man with the tinny voice shrugged his shoulders. 'Don't bother asking me,' he said. 'How about it, Hank? You were taking lines tonight. Do you remember a boat by that name or not?'
'Not many boats through here tonight,' Hank answered, sucking on his smoke. 'What's it look like?'
'It's an old T-class freighter.'
Hank nodded sagely. 'Oh, yeah,' he said. 'That one. Ugly as sin. Came through long about ten or so.'
'Who was on it?' I asked. 'Did you see anybody?'
'One guy. Red hair. Going a little bald. He was handling all the lines himself. Really had to scramble.'
'Did you see anyone else on board?'
Hank shook his head. 'Nope,' he said. 'Not a soul. Should I have?'
'No,' I answered. 'I was hoping is all.'
'So you're cops,' Voice Box said, now mulling the significance of our badges, which had long since been put away. 'What's this guy done? Killed somebody or something? How come you're looking for him?'
'Stolen goods,' Sue answered quickly, speaking up before I made a botch of it.
Hank laughed outright at that, ending with a rattly, cigarette-induced cough. 'Dumb bastard,' he said. 'Pro'ly stole that godawful boat itself, come to think of it. While he was tying up, I tried to tell him there's a front blowing in from across Vancouver Island. Small-craft advisories. Gale-force winds. But you know those stubborn damn fishermen. ‘Been out in lots worse than this,' he tells me.'
The hell he has, I thought angrily. Alan Torvoldsen might have been out in some pretty rough seas in his time, but I doubted he'd been in this much hot water.
25
By three o'clock Sunday morning, I was seeing the Seattle Police Department's bureaucratic inaction in action, which is to say, nothing was happening. For one thing, the shit had already hit the officialdom fan over what was now being called the 'Culpeper Court break-in.' The brass was worried about long-term repercussions from the warrantless search. What is sometimes overlooked down in the south end's Rainier Valley can provoke a firestorm of reaction and protest when it happens elsewhere in the city. It's been my experience that nothing moves slower than a publicity-shy bureaucracy.
What seemed obvious to me-that Else and Kari Gebhardt along with Inge Didriksen were not only missing but also in grave danger-totally eluded the comprehension of Seattle P.D.'s nighttime supervisors. One at a time, Sue and I argued our case across desks and up the chain of command. Eventually, so tired we could barely hold our heads up, we landed in the office of the department's night-watch commander, Major John Gray.
Major Gray, whom I had sometimes heard referred to as Major Grim, is a night owl who has spent years toiling on Seattle P.D.'s graveyard shift. Although he may be a nice enough guy, I had heard persistent, ongoing rumors that he was sometimes a little slow on the uptake. After five minutes of Sue's and my early-morning session with the man, I was inclined to agree with that last assessment.
Although the jigs and jags of the story seemed simple and straightforward enough to me, Major Gray was totally incapable of making the necessary and critical connections between other aspects of the case and the three missing women.
He failed to see any significance in the set of miniature soldiers that had once been thought to be made of gold but that had, on examination, turned out to be made of something else. And he saw no possible correlation between the soldiers and Gunter Gebhardt's assortment of tools, which, although they looked ordinary enough, might very well turn out to be made of gold. The fact that the tools were now also unaccountably missing didn't exactly make Major Gray's day. And he howled at my theory that this entire debacle might possibly have its origins in a failed romance from Ballard High School some thirty years earlier.
'Wait a minute here,' he said. 'Are you trying to tell me that this Norwegian fisherman, Alan what's-his-name Torvoldsen, got mixed up in all this because a Ballard girl name Else threw him over for somebody else way back in the sixties? Come on, Beau. Get real. You sound more like a hopeless romantic than a homicide cop.'
Maybe it did sound a little improbable. 'You can laugh all you want to, Major Gray,' I said, 'but I'm telling you what I believe to be true. Those three missing women are in danger. They're out on a boat with a man who, one way or the other, is involved in the plot surrounding Gunter Gebhardt's murder. Not only that, I have reason to believe this same man is also connected to a fatal house fire up on Camano Island.'
'Just for argument's sake,' Major Gray said, 'let's suppose that's all true. What do you want me to do about it?'
'I want to launch a search. The boat is capable of traveling at a rate of eight to ten knots. The longer we delay, the harder it's going to be to find them.'
Major Gray rubbed his chin. Any trained salesman in the world will tell you that's a bad sign.
He said, 'Okay, Detective Beaumont, let me play this whole scenario back to you just the way you gave it to me, and you tell me how it sounds. Three women who may or may not be missing and who may or may not have been kidnapped, are possibly-not definitely, but possibly-out on a boat in Puget Sound, traveling in some unspecified direction with an exboyfriend of one of the three women, a guy she jilted a mere thirty years ago. Does this sound a little fishy to you?'
I was beginning to wonder how come anybody ever called the night-watch commander Major Grim instead of Major Laugh-a-Minute. He sounded more like an off-the-wall stand-up comedian from one of those comedy joints down in Pioneer Square.
Major Gray paused as if waiting for me to make some comment, but I was smart enough not to fall into the trap. Especially not, considering that a rarely seen expression-an actual grin-was beginning to play around the turned-down corners of Major Grim's dour mouth.
'And now it gets better,' he continued, clearly enjoying himself. 'Although no one else besides the captain-not a single passenger-was ever seen on the aforementioned vessel when it cleared the locks, I'm still supposed to believe that, along with the three missing women, there are possibly two other people on board as well, people who are either this Torvoldsen character's fellow conspirators or the Gebhardt woman's fellow victims. Take your pick.
'One of the invisible extra people is supposedly a presumed Nazi war criminal who's been missing for fifty- some years. The other is an unemployed secret agent from East Germany, a country that no longer exists.'
'It was raining,' I argued feebly. 'If the passengers were all inside the boat, nobody would have seen them.' Despite that puny attempt at sidetracking him, I already knew it was hopeless. By then Major Gray was having far too good a time.
'Based on all the above-most of which is solely on your say-so and conjecture-I'm expected to alert the media, call in the Coast Guard-maybe even the National Guard-and institute an air-and-ground search.'
'An air-and-sea search,' I corrected.
'Whatever,' Major Gray shook his head. 'You can call it any kind of a search you damn well please, Detective Beaumont, but I'm telling you, it ain't a-gonna happen. Not on my watch. Because you've got nothing here to justify it except a few wild figments of your overly active imagination.
'The kind of search-and-rescue operation you want would necessarily cover a large geographical area. Do you have any idea what that would cost? Puget Sound isn't exactly a damn bathtub. We're talking an arm and a leg here-thousands of dollars an hour. That's a lot of cash. We don't happen to have that kind of money sitting around loose in some petty-cash drawer, you know. The only person who could authorize that kind of outlay is the chief himself. I'm sure as hell not calling him in on this. And neither are you. Do I make myself clear?'
'Yes, sir. Loud and clear.'
Major Gray shook his head. 'Now get out of here, you two. Go home and get some rest. Sleep it off.'
Without another word, Sue and I stood up and started toward the door. 'Detective Danielson,' Major Gray called after us, 'if you have any influence on your partner here, you might encourage him to turn off the boob tube. I think he must be watching too many of those World-War-Two era movies on the movie channel.'
'What's the movie channel?' I grumbled to Sue when we were out in the hall with the door closed.
'It's on cable,' she informed me. 'Don't you get cable TV down in that high-flying condo of yours?'
