He Huffed and He Puffed Page 6

  There was much grumbling in the offices of the marine insurers in Los Angeles. The Burly Girl had been due for an examination by an insurance inspector upon her return, and everyone who knew the ship agreed she didn’t have a chance in hell of passing the inspection. She’d been a serviceable ship in her day, but that day was long past. But the premium payments were up-to-date; the insurers had no choice but to pay.

  The insurance check saved Richard Bruce’s neck. Instead of replacing the Burly Girl, he bought shares in three of the new-style cargo ships. All three prospered; Bruce was on his way.

  But then a Honolulu-based salvage company located the wrecked ship. The forward holds were still intact; and to everyone’s surprise, the supposedly jettisoned cargo was still there. When the shipping crates were broken open, however, they were found to contain rusted auto parts, twisted scraps of metal, cast-off cast iron. Where the ship’s manifest had said textile machinery, there was nothing but junk. What’s more, divers uncovered evidence that the Burly Girl had been scuttled.

  The engine room had been deliberately flooded; the inspection covers had been broken off the main condensers—a big job with two covers per condenser, and with no way it could have happened by accident. The divers looked further; they inspected the bilge suction lines running from each hold. In the aft starboard hold, they found the check valves had been taken out of the lines, causing them to pump seawater back into the hold. The flooding of either the hold or the engine room alone wouldn’t have been enough to sink the ship; but the fact that the safeguards in both places had been removed made it clear as day that someone didn’t want the Burly Girl to make it back to port.

  The investigation took over a year. Eventually a shipping broker in Yokohama was found who admitted to arranging a sale of the missing cargo for the captain of the Burly Girl. The broker protested that Captain Stone had presented the proper bill of lading, which he himself had had no reason to suspect of being bogus. The cargo had been loaded on another freighter and shipped to San Francisco.

  Captain Stone had obviously scuttled the Burly Girl to hide his theft of the cargo, and he’d sailed directly into the squall as a cover. But how could one man alone steal an entire ship’s cargo? He must have had help. It would have been virtually impossible to hide something like that from the first mate; the mate must have been in on it. And Captain Stone must have had an accomplice standing by in a boat to pick him up. But what of the rest of the crew? There’d been thirty-five other men on board in addition to the captain and the mate. Had Stone just abandoned them?

  Something else the salvage company’s divers had found: the remains of two bodies in the engine room. There was no way of telling how many, if any, had been swept out to sea. Perhaps the men had been evacuated, except for the two unfortunate hands who’d been trapped below. But since none of the crew had reappeared anywhere, it seemed more likely that the captain’s rescue plan included only himself and the first mate or whoever it was who’d helped him. But whichever way it had happened, at least two men had died as the result of the commission of a felony. A warrant for murder was issued in Captain Stone’s name.

  Richard Bruce’s insurers had screamed there was no way the ship’s owner could not have been in on the plot. What a remarkable coincidence, they proclaimed sarcastically, that all this should happen just before the Burly Girl was due for inspection—an inspection everyone knew she couldn’t pass. But after months of digging, the investigators were able to turn up no evidence to indicate that the owner had had so much as an inkling of what Captain Stone was planning. Richard Bruce was completely exonerated.

  All that had been seventeen years earlier. Captain Stone had never been found, nor any other survivor of the Burly Girl’s last voyage. All but the captain were declared legally dead after seven years had passed, even the first mate; there was no proof he had conspired with the captain, only speculation. The three ships in which Richard Bruce had invested the insurance money had done so well that eventually he was able to buy out his partners. Over the years Bruce added to his fleet whenever he could until now Bruce Shipping Lines was one of the dominant names in the overseas freight business.

  That’s where things stood at present. A. J. Strode had studied all the records of the investigation of the sinking of the Burly Girl and said to Castleberry, “Thirty-five dead sailors mean thirty-five grieving women somewhere. Find them. One of them might know something. Check the captain’s and the mate’s families too.”

  So Myron Castleberry had sent Pierce to Los Angeles. The New York detective had hired a firm of California detectives to help him. They’d been able to track down twenty-seven of the regular crew’s families, but none of them knew any more than what the records showed. Captain Stone’s wife had died five years earlier, but a daughter was now living in San Diego. She was of no help, however; she’d been only ten at the time of the incident.

  The first mate’s widow had been located in Venice. And she knew something.

  Pierce reported that the first time he tried to question her she’d grown alarmed and almost panicked. He’d gone back several times, trying to find out what she was so frightened of. The woman’s name was Estelle Rankin, and she didn’t want to talk about the man she’d been married to. Mrs. Rankin kept saying things like It was all so long ago and Why dredge all that up now? But eventually it became clear to Pierce that the first mate’s widow was afraid of Richard Bruce.

  Castleberry flew out to see her. He found a woman down on her luck and depressed. The monthly stipend paid her by the Maritime Widows Pension Fund was not enough to live on; for the past seventeen years she’d been working at a series of petty jobs, each less remunerative than the last as she aged and became less attractive as an employee. Now she was working part-time at a food concession on Venice Fishing Pier and hated it. In other words, she was ripe.

  Castleberry quickly caught on that Mrs. Rankin was afraid of losing her pension if her late husband was proved guilty of complicity in the sinking of the Burly Girl. Castleberry offered her double her monthly pension payment for the rest of her life if she could come up with some information they could use. Still she hesitated. If she was afraid of someone, Castleberry suggested tactfully, his employer would gladly underwrite her moving expenses if she wished to relocate to another part of the country. She said that for the last few years she’d been thinking of moving to Oregon. He said Oregon was a nice place to live.

  Only when Castleberry handed her a contract signed by A. J. Strode himself was she willing to talk. Once she was assured of both her safety and her financial future, she couldn’t talk enough. She’d kept it all bottled up for seventeen years, and now it just came pouring out.

  Scuttling the Burly Girl had been Richard Bruce’s idea, Mrs. Rankin said. For his part in the plan, Captain Stone was to receive whatever he could sell the cargo for. But he couldn’t manage alone, so he offered to split with his first mate in return for his help. Harry wasn’t a bad man, Mrs. Rankin apologized; it was just that things had been going badly for them and they were getting a little desperate for money. She made Castleberry uncomfortable; the woman was pleading with a stranger for understanding, seventeen years after her husband’s death.

  She’d begged him not to go through with it, she said; but once Captain Stone had approached him, Harry Rankin’s fate was sealed. He was afraid to back out; Richard Bruce was a man you didn’t cross. So Harry and Captain Stone agreed to divert the real cargo in Yokohama and have crates of junk loaded in its place. They were going to delay sailing until they got the kind of weather they needed to pull it off: bad, but not too bad. Captain Stone showed his mate the place on the charts where Richard Bruce would be waiting with a boat large enough to take aboard the entire thirty-seven-man crew of the Burly Girl.

  At least that was the plan. But in his last letter to his wife, mailed in Japan, Harry Rankin had expressed doubts that he’d been told the whole story. Over and over he’d asked Captain Stone if he was sure the entire crew would
be taken aboard Bruce’s boat and not just the two of them. The captain had said yes, yes, they’ll all be safe. But his first mate was suspicious; he’d seen his captain lie too many times before not to recognize the signs.

  A letter? Castleberry asked, hoping against hope. She wouldn’t still happen to have it, would she?

  She would. The ink was faded but the writing was perfectly legible. There it was, the incriminating evidence they’d been looking for. Harry Rankin didn’t mind a little stealing in a good cause, but leaving thirty-five men behind to die—he’d balked at that. Harry wrote his wife that he planned to stick to Captain Stone like a leech. It was the only thing he could think to do.

  Castleberry folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “Is that what you think happened? Bruce took off your husband and the captain but left the others?”

  She shook her head. “Even if Harry decided to run out on me, he wouldn’t have left me dangling all these years. There would have been a postcard, something. No, my husband’s dead, I know that. He never got off that ship.”

  Castleberry watched her pinched face and guessed she must be imagining what it was like, those last moments on the Burly Girl. “Then what? The captain, er, overpowered your husband and left him behind with the others?”

  “I don’t see how. Harry was a big, husky man, Mr. Castleberry. Captain Stone was a shrimp. If there was any overpowering done, it would have gone the other way.”

  Castleberry understood. “You’re saying Richard Bruce left them all to drown, Captain Stone included. He didn’t show up with the rescue boat.”

  She frowned. “They wouldn’t have scuttled her without first making sure he was out there waiting for them. There had to be a signal of some sort. The ship sank at night, you know. I think he showed up, flashed a light or sent off a flare or whatever they’d agreed on, and then simply pulled away once he saw the Burly Girl going down. Richard Bruce deliberately murdered all those men—just to collect an insurance check.”

  Castleberry was as appalled as she sounded. “Does Richard Bruce know about this letter? He’d have paid a lot for it.”

  The look she gave him made him wish he hadn’t said anything. “Extort money from the man who killed my husband? What kind of person do you think I am?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Rankin. Of course you wouldn’t make money off your husband’s death, I know that. I just wanted to make sure Richard Bruce doesn’t know anything about this letter. He doesn’t, does he?”

  “No. I thought of taking it to the police. But they’d want me to testify to what Harry told me of the plan … and I was afraid. Any man who’d murder an entire ship’s crew wouldn’t stop at killing one lone woman. Besides, the pension fund might stop my payments …” She made a vague gesture with one hand.

  Castleberry assured her she wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore. Over the next few days he got her to sign a statement, arranged with a moving company to transport her household goods to Oregon, and left her with enough cash for a plane ticket. She seemed relieved at having finally told someone, and Castleberry sincerely wished her well.

  Back in New York, A. J. Strode had been every bit as appalled as Castleberry when he learned what Richard Bruce had done. He and his assistant agreed immediately that Harry Rankin’s letter to his wife should be turned over to the police just as soon as Strode was finished with it. But the letter stayed in the file folder; at the time Strode still had Joanna Gillespie and Jack McKinstry to try, and he didn’t want to do anything about Richard Bruce until he was sure of House of Glass.

  The man was too dangerous; he had to be utterly conscienceless. In addition to that, Strode’s search for House of Glass stock was costing him an arm and a leg. He totted up his expenses so far and added in what he planned to pay for the stock, assuming someone would sell. He compared the total to a projection provided by his analysts as to his profit over a five-year period if House of Glass were eliminated from the competition. When he saw the takeover would pay for itself in a year, he knew he had to go back to California.

  It was standard operating procedure for Strode to dig up something reprehensible or at least disreputable from an adversary’s past and use it as a cattle prod. But in nearly forty years of doing business, he had never once had to deal with someone who took human life to get what he wanted. He’d dealt with people who killed indirectly—by ignoring safety precautions for their workers, by putting lethal products on the market. Killing a whole town by shutting down the only source of employment in order to get a tax write-off. But that was business; that went with the territory. But actually planning a murder and then carrying it out with one’s own two hands … that was something from another world.

  But then he’d set his sights on House of Glass and found himself up against not one killer but three. That made even A. J. Strode pause. Could he have dealt with killers before and not known it? But that wasn’t the immediate problem; right now he had to concern himself with Joanna Gillespie, Jack McKinstry, and Richard Bruce. Among them they were responsible for the deaths of forty-three people. Gillespie killed her family and McKinstry killed his friends, but for sheer numbers Richard Bruce was the winner hands down. Hands down indeed. All hands had gone down, in the stormy Hawaiian waters seventeen years ago. Richard Bruce had seen to that.

  This was the man they’d come to Los Angeles to meet.

  Their appointment was for eleven. When Castleberry arranged for a limo to pick them up, he’d asked for a driver familiar with the port area. Los Angeles harbor covered nearly thirty miles of coastline; everything was well marked, but it was still easy to get lost there. The driver took the Harbor Freeway to the West Basin, where Richard Bruce’s office was located.

  On the way Castleberry was still trying to talk Strode out of it. “You don’t know what else he might have done,” he argued. “One of his competitors conveniently died in an accident, you know. And Bruce is a widower—maybe he killed his wife. And a harbormaster who was giving him trouble simply disappeared. Disappeared! Mr. Strode, you shouldn’t even be in the same city with this man!” The two bodyguards were listening with interest.

  “Aren’t you letting your imagination run away with you?” Strode asked testily, not liking Castleberry’s uncharacteristically tactless implication that he was no match for Richard Bruce. “Nobody can go around killing whenever he feels like it and never get caught. He’s not Superman, for god’s sake. I don’t want to deal with him, but I’m not going in with my eyes closed. I know what I’m up against.”

  “Then stay in the car with one of the guards and let me talk to him. Better still, just mail him the envelope. You don’t have to see him in person.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. A man like Bruce won’t tamely follow instructions that come in the mail. He’s going to have to see for himself that I’m not just making noise for the fun of it. And I want to make this as easy for him as I can. Just another business deal.”

  Sure it is, Castleberry’s face said.

  Bruce Shipping Lines occupied a five-story building, with the owner’s offices on the top floor. An unsmiling secretary ushered them in.

  The inner office gleamed with polished wood, even the floor. Richard Bruce was standing at his desk, his back to a wide window that looked out over the harbor. He was leaning over a set of printouts but stood up straight when Strode and company walked in, showing an almost military bearing. Bruce had a composed, expressionless face and a compact body, carrying no extra weight. Not too tall, in his early fifties, black hair with dramatic gray streaks in it. Bruce was a well-tailored man; he wore his obviously expensive suit with ease. The man was downright elegant. Castleberry thought he could have posed for a chamber of commerce advertisement depicting an idealized version of the successful American businessman.

  One of Strode’s guards stayed outside and closed the office door behind them. The other positioned himself with his back to the door. Bruce noticed the arrangement but made no comment. He fixed his eyes on
Strode and waited; he was not the one who’d requested this meeting.

  “May I sit down?” Strode asked, sitting down. “Thank you.” He’d deliberately placed himself on an inferior level, having to look up to Bruce when he spoke. The message was clear. He was so sure of his position, he didn’t have to play that particular upmanship game—which, of course, was an upmanship game itself. “I won’t beat around the bush, Mr. Bruce. I want your House of Glass shares.”

  Bruce let a beat pass before he answered. “So do I.” His voice was musical and not as deep as might be expected.

  “You’ve had that stock for less than a year. I understand you accepted it as payment from a shipper whose account had gotten out of hand?”

  Bruce’s left eyebrow raised a fraction. None of your damned business, the eyebrow said.

  “You’ll make a profit if you sell to me now,” Strode went on.

  “Yes, I’m aware of that, but I think I’ll hold on to the shares.”

  “Even when I tell you I plan to shut House of Glass down?”

  “Even so. You can’t shut down without my shares.”

  It struck Strode that Bruce already knew about his plans; he wasn’t surprised to hear of the intended shutdown and he needed no time to think it over before he replied. The shipowner had been doing a little checking of his own; Strode wondered what else the man knew about him. Right there and then he abandoned any further attempt at gentlemanly persuasion. “Castleberry?”

  Still standing, Castleberry juggled his briefcase and took out a large manila envelope which he laid on top of the printouts on Bruce’s desk. “You’ll want to take a look at this, Mr. Bruce.”

  Bruce kept his eyes on Strode a moment. Then he sat down at his desk and slowly picked up the envelope. Inside was a copy of Estelle Rankin’s statement and a copy of her husband’s last letter; the latter had been inserted into the original envelope. Bruce read the letter first. When he came to the signature, he lifted his eyes to Strode and asked, “Harry?”