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 together. 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.
