The Corpse Without a Country Read online

  COST OF CHARACTERS

  Peter Durham

  The only paperwork he had in this case was a fortune in stolen pound notes.

  Reese Fuller

  He steered his boats to some strange ports of call.

  Jodi Rasmussen

  For an artist, she had a very keen business sense.

  Ilona

  When she got her hands on a man, it was either to pet him or pin him.

  Ridley Trillian

  For him, being a member of the Beat Generation meant beating up everyone who stood in his way.

  The Corp e Without A Country

  Alive she was unpopular; dead, she was an international celebrity.

  The Corpse Without a Country

  by Louis Trimble

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  Also Available

  Copyright

  I

  BIG ARNE RASMUSSEN was slowly tying a knot in a quarter-inch bar of reinforcing steel. This was a habit of his when he was upset. And he was definitely upset now. Sweat beaded his forehead although it was a pleasantly cool, early September afternoon. The sunlight that came into the pilot house of the fishboat where we were was soft and hazy and without any particular warmth. The door to the after deck was open, and the light breeze that blew through it already held the promise of evening chill.

  Arne certainly wasn’t sweating from the heat.

  I said, “Damn it, Arne, for the third time—where is Tom Harbin?”

  Arne gave the iron bar a final swist that fixed it into the shape of a pretzel. He let it hang in his left hand while he shook twenty pounds of knobby-knuckled fist under my nose. His heavy Scandinavian jaw jutted angrily at me.

  “You damn snoopers!” he bellowed. “You think I’m trying to rob you?”

  Despite the fact that Arne had been in this country for forty of his fifty-five years, his English still contained the rhythm of his native language, and his “th’s” still came out so that “think” sounded like “t’ink” and “these” sounded like “dese.” Other than that, and a tendency to butcher grammar, he spoke English fluently, especially when he cussed. And he began to cuss me now.

  But I had dealt with Big Arne before. I just let him bellow himself out of breath and then pushed his fist to one side. “Don’t you shout at me, you big Norski,” I yelled back at him. “Our company has never failed to pay one of your insurance claims yet and you know it.”

  I took a deep breath and pushed my jaw at him. Only I had to tilt my head upward because Arne stood six-feet-five in clean winter socks. I yelled louder. “So what are you afraid of?”

  He lifted his fist again and took aim at my jaw; then he dropped his arm. Someday, I knew, Arne Rasmussen was going to use that fist on me as he had in the old days when I had been a member of his crew and he considered it his duty to teach “the young punk some manners.” But now our relationship was different. I was an insurance investigator and he was my client. And now I had all the manners I needed to handle him.

  “I ain’t afraid of nothing,” he said. His voice had lowered to its normal shout. “And I told you what happened. Tom Harbin comes here last night, maybe an hour after I do. I show him what the fire did to the engine room. He fills out one of them damn forms. I sign it. He asks me questions.”

  He took in a fresh supply of air. “I’m supposed to know the answers to his damn questions? When the fire happens I’m home in Puget City. But the fire is here on the Norway Flyer. And the Flyer, she’s out in the Sound. The skipper is in the hospital. He can’t answer no fool questions. He looks like a barbecued salmon.”

  I said patiently, “Tom had to get his information from somewhere, from someone. Why shouldn’t he ask you? You own this tub.”

  I was getting sore at his attitude or I never would have called one of his boats a tub. Because it wasn’t. It was almost a hundred feet of solid, trim, and perfectly kept fishing vessel. And Arne had seen it built in his own boat yard. Next to his personal boat, the Norway Queen, the Flyer was his favorite of all his small fleet.

  He was so angry now that he forgot to shout. He said, “Go to the hospital and see the skipper. He’s information enough. And go look in the engine room if you think this tub didn’t have no fire.”

  I said, “All right. I’m sorry. But what caused the fire, damn it?”

  His lips flattened out in that stubborn way I had learned to know so well in the days when I had fished for him. He was about to stop talking altogether. I said quickly, “Look at it our way, Arne. This is the third boat of yours that’s had a fire this season. And all of them within the past month. All of them engine room fires.”

  He decided to say something after all. “I know. You think I don’t know, Durham? And all them fires in the same place, too.”

  I didn’t follow that remark. All I knew about the fires I had learned from the boss when he telephoned me in Anchorage and told me to stop here on my way home.

  I said, “I don’t get that one, Arne.”

  This part of it he seemed to want to talk about. His voice had a worried rumble in it. “The first fire I had myself, on the Queen. I was coming home from the Gulf of Alaska, loaded with halibut. I got opposite Boundary Rock and I bring out a bottle like I always do when we cross the Canadian line and get back into home waters. And what happens just when I left that bottle? The engineer yells fire! And smoke comes stinking up out of my engine room.”

  I said, “I was on a job in Alaska when that happened. But I’ll bet we paid the claim.”

  “Yah, a thousand dollars,” he said, as if that was no money at all. And to Arne it wasn’t much.

  I said, “If that’s all, why worry? Any boat can have a fire. Even the Queen.”

  Arne admitted that, but reluctantly, because to him the Queen was the perfect fishing vessel. He had supervised every inch of her building and had done a good deal of the work himself. He lived aboard her when he was in port; he used her for both a home and an office. Arne Rasmussen was the only man I knew who ran a million dollar business from the pilot house of a hundred-foot fishing boat.

  “We wouldn’t have worried,” he said, “but then there was the fire on the Norway Fiord. It happened right off Boundary Rock when the skipper was about to hand around the bottle. A little fire that one.”

  I said, “And the Flyer had her trouble in the same place yesterday?”

  Arne looked very unhappy. “It’s a yinx,” he muttered.

  “You stopped believing in jinxes when you turned honest twenty-five years ago,” I told him.

  I sniffed. The wind had shifted and I could smell the odor of charred wood and scorched metal even up here. “How much do you figure the damage on this one?”

  “It was a bad one, all right,” Arne said. “The coast guard had to tow her in, and she wallowing like a sick whale. Oh, she was a bad one.”

  He sounded as if he would get all worked up about it. He even muttered a few phrases in Norwegian. But I refused to be fooled. I had learned a kind of fishboat Norski when I worked for him and I knew he wasn’t saying anything worth hearing. I said, “Don’t dodge the issue, Arne. How much are you going to try to get out of us?”

  “That isn’t my yo
b,” he said. “Reese Fuller’ll come up to estimate the damage.”

  Reese Fuller was Arne’s second in command. He ran the boat yard, and a big salvage operation that sometimes took him all over the world. I was wondering why he hadn’t arrived before now.

  I said, “What do three fires all in the same place add up to?”

  “A yinx,” he said again, hopefully.

  This was another way he had of being stubborn. I stopped hedging. I said flatly, “Tom Harbin flew up here yesterday to check on this fire.” I looked at my watch. “That was nearly twenty-four hours ago, and the boss hasn’t had a report from Tom. He made a check. Tom wasn’t in his room all night.” ‘I raised my voice. “So where is he?”

  “Yesus!” Arne bellowed. “You think I’m deaf? I tell you I don’t know. He sniffed and snooped and I gave him a couple drinks and maybe some coffee and at two o’clock he went away. And that’s all I know.”

  I said, “So why did you sweat when I started asking questions?”

  Arne glared at me. I glared back. I was worried, and when I worry, I get mad. I was worried about Tom Harbin and I was worried about Arne. They were among the few friends I had. It wasn’t like Tom not to report promptly to the office, and it wasn’t like Arne to be afraid of anything, not even a “yinx.”

  He was evading me now and there was nothing I could do about it. I hadn’t been an insurance investigator for Oscar Harbin’s marine insurance company for six years without learning a little about people. I could usually tell when the tank was about to go dry. If Arne had anything to say to me, he wasn’t going to say it now.

  I tried a different tack. “What’s your theory, Arne? Is someone trying to sabotage you?”

  “Sabotage me!” He let out a great guffaw and slapped his leg hard enough to knock an ordinary man sprawling. “I ain’t got no enemies.” A faraway, recalling-the-past kind of look came into his pale blue eyes. “Not no more.”

  “Labor troubles, maybe?”

  “All my men work on shares. I got no labor. I got partners.”

  “On the boats, sure. But what about at the yard?”

  “That’s Reese Fuller’s department. If he’s got troubles, he ain’t said nothing to me.”

  He picked up the iron bar and began to straighten it again. He tossed it aside, half finished. “I tell you, it’s a yinx.”

  I said, “Anyone but a hardheaded Norski would have done something after that second fire. But all you do is yell ‘yinx’ and wait for the next one. So you damn near lost the Flyer.”

  Arne gave me a cold look. “You think I made my money being a dumb Norwegian? You talk like I’m a Swede. I did something—after the first fire. I hired my own man. That’s why I don’t need you snoopers. I got one of my own.”

  That surprised me. I couldn’t think of another agency in the region but ours that could handle this kind of job. I said, “Who’d you get?”

  Arne said in a flat voice, “That’s my business,” and he turned his back on me, something he hadn’t done in twenty years.

  II

  I WAS CURIOUS TO KNOW just what was making Arne tick this way, but I was more concerned with Tom Harbin. I went on deck, dropped to the dock, and stopped. I didn’t know which way to go from here. Ahead of me, up the hill, was the town. And between here and there were a number of taverns. Knowing Tom Harbin, I wondered if he might not have made a few stops on his way to his hotel. If so, he could still be trying to get there.

  But he hadn’t left Arne until two in the morning; and at that hour the bars would have been closed. Besides that, the last few years he had begun to take his job seriously. I dismissed the idea that he might be somewhere drunk.

  I looked west. Beyond the point was the northern tip of Lummi Island, and beyond it the Sound and Boundary Pass. Out there too was Boundary Island, with Boundary Rock just off shore. Out there the fires had occurred.

  I had a hunch, or maybe I was just crediting Tom Harbin with having done what I would do. I was pretty sure he had gone out there, especially if he had got no more satisfaction from Arne than I had.

  I started down the dock toward a nearby sign that read “Boat Charters,” and I saw Mike Fenney. He was easing a twenty-foot outboard cabin cruiser into a slip at the charter dock. I lengthened my stride and met him as he climbed onto the pier.

  I had last seen Mike Fenney on the corner of Salmon Avenue and Harbor Way in Puget City. He was selling the newspapers he had once helped write. He wore a pair of ragged dungarees and a ragged sweatshirt and a dirty hat on his balding head. He breathed fortified wine with every paper he peddled.

  But now he was wearing an expensive-looking yachting costume with a billed yachting cap, and there was nothing on his breath a tooth brush couldn’t take care of.

  He looked better than he had in six years. His skin had color in it and a tan from sun and wind. The wine cloudiness was almost gone from his dark eyes, and he had begun to put back a little of the flesh that six years of swilling muscatel had wasted off his long, bony frame.

  He had been a gentleman for thirty-five years and a bum for six. Now he looked almost the gentleman again. He had been a great newspaperman for a town our size, twice considered for the Pulitzer Prize.

  He didn’t look happy to see me. He ducked out of shaking my hand by flipping his fingers at the bill of his yachting cap in a kind of mock salute.

  “How’s the insurance company hawkshaw?”

  I said, “What gives, Mike?”

  “With me? I just wanted a change of scenery, so I went for a boat ride.” He flashed a satiric grin that showed he still had two upper teeth missing. “See you, Durham. I’ve got a date.”

  He sidestepped me like a quick-witted bar drinker sidesteps a lush and left me with my hand still out and my mouth hanging open.

  I stood and watched him stride off. He glanced back, saw me watching, and again gave me that half mocking salute. Then he turned and trudged out of sight behind a warehouse. I had half expected him to head for the Norway Flyer; the idea in my mind was that he could be the man Arne hired. It wasn’t too farfetched an idea, either, even if Fenney was a wino: a good newspaperman is often a good detective. And he looked as if he had straightened himself to where he could become a good newspaperman again.

  But he hadn’t gone toward the Flyer, and I pushed him to the back of my mind. I was concerned with Tom Harbin right now. I went to find the charter boat operator. I found a whiskered old-timer in an eight-by-eight hut. He had his tail in a chair and his feet on a desk. He was as motionless as the furniture. I coughed.

  He left his feet where they were, opened one eye, and said, “I got boats twenty bucks a day up to fifty. You want anything fancier, go somewheres else.”

  I came to the point. “Did a man about thirty, tall, dark hair, olive skin, charter a boat from you recently? Maybe early this morning?”

  The old man came alive at that. His feet came down hard on the floor, bringing up a spurt of dust. “These damn young bucks! At three in the morning he wants a boat. Had to get out to some island and start diddling, I suppose.”

  If the old man had got that impression, Tom could have been the one. I said, “What time did he check back in?”

  “In? Hell! He ain’t showed yet. Got my best outboard too.”

  I said, “Can I see the register or whatever you had him sign?”

  It cost me a five-dollar bill, but I got to see Tom’s bold signature. I noticed that he had rented a cream and white fiberglass twin outboard cabin cruiser.

  I said, “I suppose he headed west.”

  “Where else is he going from here?” the old man demanded. “The water’s to the west.”

  I shifted to another tack. “How long has that boat that just came in been out?”

  “Since eight this morning. You’re a curious young feller.”

  I said, “I was born that way. How about chartering it to me?”

  “Thirty a day plus a hundred dollar deposit on the deductible insurance,” he
said quickly.

  I had the feeling it was worth about twenty a day, but I paid without arguing. He tucked the money away, handed me a standard form to sign, and went off to fill the gas tank.

  The boat was fiberglass and powered by a thirty horse outboard. It handled well and had all the speed I needed. I took it well into the channel and then opened the throttle.

  By the time I got beyond Lummi Island, the last of the sun was silhouetting the peaks of Vancouver Island. The air was chilly but filled with the crisp, tangy odor of salt water. It felt good to be aboard a boat after flying all day in a big rocking chair of an airplane.

  By the time I reached the southern end of Boundary Pass, with Corning Island dead ahead, the water lay under deepening purple shadows of coming night and the outlines of the islands had begun to blend into the darkening sea. A cheerful pinprick of yellow light showed from a house on the northeast side of Corning. I waved at it.

  Boundary Island was less than a half mile north of Corning and slightly to the west. I decided it was time to look for Tom’s boat.

  As I swung north to avoid the currents off Corning, I heard a powerful outboard buzzing somewhere off in the dark. I wondered if this might not be Tom, but the boat didn’t appear. I put Boundary Island dead ahead and opened the throttle.

  Boundary is almost rock-rimmed, but it has two small, crescent-shaped bays, one on its east side and one facing west. The Rock, which is sliced exactly in two by the Canadian-United States line, lies off the northern point that helps form the west bay. I swung around the Island toward the Rock, thinking that if Tom had come here, it would be the logical place for him to tie up.

  On top of the low cabin there was a spotlight on a swivel. I switched it on as I slowed to maneuver into the bay. The light picked out a crescent of white sand beach and beyond it, the start of thick fir timber and heavy fern undergrowth that covered most of the land. The island was only a little over a square mile in area, but it was rugged, with a regular mountain peak popping up out of the timber in the center. As far as I know it was waterless and uninhabited.