Death on the Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Osgood,” Villas said. “I may need to talk to you again, but you have been most helpful.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The ship declared the evening Formal Night. Why all cruises do that, I don’t quite understand. I think it’s a holdover from the glory days of the Titanic when scions of American industry rubbed elbows with British lords and dukes in the first-class dining hall while lesser folk ate in second-class, and refugees from the famine in Ireland stuck it out in steerage. But I went along with it and wore my size eight black dress with my Swarovski crystal necklace.

  Two women from America sat with us at dinner. I’d seen them several times already, one being the squash-shaped woman I’d seen flirting with Marco the night before, and again that morning, barging out of the Internet café, incensed the ship had no high-speed cable connection. Ernestine Ziegler introduced herself and her daughter, Heather, adding that they were both nurses. Ernestine worked in med/surg at a large Chicago hospital, she told us, and Heather was a pediatric nurse for a private practitioner. Ollie was unable to attend due to his excesses earlier in the day, but Lettie was there. Kathryn Gaskill also ate with us, and that made Marco the lone man at a table with five women.

  Marco, incidentally, looked good enough to eat in a charcoal suit, obviously hand-tailored, a light gray shirt, and diagonally striped tie. Italians do know how to dress.

  I found myself musing at the relationship between the Zieglers, mother and daughter. Ernestine dominated the dinner conversation but Heather spoke only when spoken to. Ernestine’s round face, framed by an extra chin and hair that reminded me of a doll I’d once had—the one I’d tried to give a permanent using glue and bobby pins—was accented by too-red lipstick, too-small glasses, and too-thin hoop earrings.

  Heather Ziegler reminded me of Robert Burns’s description of a mouse: “Wee sleeket, cow’rin beastie.” She was twenty-five years old, unmarried, and lived with her mother, who, having expunged all traces of her second husband after he joined a doomsday cult, had resumed use of her first husband’s (Heather’s father’s) name. Marco and Lettie listened in silence while I, with perverse glee, dug into the Ziegler family history. Heather, I discovered, had not been allowed to go away to college because her mother wouldn’t let her. She had taken her nursing degree from a nearby community college.

  Not only did Marco look irresistible tonight, he turned out to be a good dancer, too. After dinner we went dancing in the mid-section of the Hera deck where a five-piece band cranked out tunes from the forties and fifties. Both Lettie and Kathryn declined our invitation to join us, but as a waiter seated us at a small table near the dance floor, a martini-swilling Ernestine burbled coquettishly at Marco from a nearby table. I quickly shoved one of the two empty chairs at our table away, ostensibly for more leg room, but actually to make it difficult for her and Heather to join us without moving furniture.

  After placing our drink order, Marco led me to the dance floor. The band played “Perfidia.” He swirled me into the center of the floor with an easy grace that left no doubt about who was leading. I tried to recall the last time I’d danced with a man. It might have been with Chet, in fact. My ex-husband. It would have been more than three years ago at a Christmas party where the girl/woman with whom my husband was destined to run off had stood icily by, waiting for her chance to cut in. I shivered at the memory.

  “You are the prettiest woman here, Dotsy.”

  “Oh, shucks. You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “You do not like me without a beard, do you?”

  “Of course I like you, with or without a beard. How silly.”

  “You are very . . .”

  “Very what? I’m having a lovely time, Marco. Don’t try to analyze me, okay?” I looked at him, smiled, and winked in a way I hoped would convey simple fun.

  At a table on the other side, Brittany Benson sat, her body turned at an angle that gave the entire room a good view of her long dancer’s legs. She was leaning forward toward the man who was sitting with her, smiling, running her finger around the lip of her wine glass. When he turned his head slightly I saw it was Willem Leclercq.

  “Dotsy?”

  “Huh?”

  “You are not listening to me.”

  “I was looking at Brittany Benson over there. When did she and Leclercq get together?”

  Marco turned his head and followed my gaze. “Interesting.”

  “We know he wants the krater she picked up in Mykonos.” I paused a moment and thought about that.

  “And we know he played cards with the man who was convicted of abusing her, only a few minutes before that man was killed.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “Coincidences do happen, Dotsy.”

  I scanned the rest of the room as Marco swirled me around. Nigel Endicott was sitting alone at a table in the back, Malcolm Stone and a couple I didn’t know had a table near the bandstand, and Ernestine Ziegler was studying Marco’s backside with obvious relish.

  We returned to our table and found our drinks waiting for us. Marco raised one eyebrow at me tilting his head toward the music, but the band had lit into a song that sounded way too tango-like for my skill level. I shook my head. Leclercq, I noticed, clasped his hand over Brittany’s and his left leg was touching hers.

  “I wish you could have been in the security office when Lettie was telling us what she remembered from the time of the murder.” Marco laughed and slapped his forehead. “She remembered everything! The name of the shop she went into, even though it was in Greek, the color of the cat in the alley.”

  “How did Chief Letsos react to her?”

  “Like he could not believe his ears.”

  “Did you learn anything new?”

  “Yes. Papadakos, the photographer. He is from Crete, you know. From an olive-growing part of central Crete where his family still lives. Now, what is important about that?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

  “Many of the illegal artifacts of Minoan origin come from central Crete. We get them coming through Italy on their way to the rest of the world. Bronzes and pottery of all sorts are smuggled out and they find their way onto the international market.”

  “What could Papadakos have to do with that? He was a photographer.”

  “I do not know, but it seems to me that working on a cruise ship which stops off in Crete, in Rhodes, in Turkey, in Santorini . . .” Marco planted his right hand in spots around the table as if it were a map of the eastern Mediterranean. “It would be a way to pick up goods in one place and drop them off in another.”

  “What about customs? How would he get things through customs?”

  “I do not know, but they would only have to go through customs if they were brought to shore in Athens, I think, and I do not believe customs in the port of Piraeus is very strict. There are planes, you know. Little private planes, all sorts of planes fly between Santorini, Rhodes, Rome, and Athens every day.”

  “So Papadakos could have been killed by a fellow smuggler?”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Malcolm Stone and he bowed slightly as he asked me to dance. The band was now playing “Béseme Mucho.” I glanced at Marco, unsure of whether I should accept or decline, and saw a look of irritation—almost anger—flash across his face. But he nodded assent as Stone took my hand and led me toward the dance floor.

  He wasn’t nearly as good a dancer as Marco. Stiff as a robot. But then, I told myself, he probably hadn’t danced since his wife died some years ago. He was tall enough so that, even in my high heels, I found myself staring at his bow tie.

  “Your friend, Captain Quattrocchi, isn’t it? Have you known each other a long time?”

  “I met him two years ago when Lettie Osgood and I went to Italy together.”

  “And since then?”

  “Since then, what?”

  “Has he come to America to see you? Have you seen him since your trip to Italy?” He stepped on my foot and
apologized more than necessary. “What I’m trying to find out, quite clumsily, is whether the two of you consider yourselves a couple?”

  “No, we’re not a couple, but we did plan this trip together.”

  “He’s in on the investigation into George Gaskill’s murder, isn’t he?”

  “In an unofficial capacity, yes.”

  “Are they making any progress? What a horrible thing it was! I mean, Willem and I were with him an hour before his death.” Stone shook me with his shiver.

  “We don’t know he died an hour after your card game ended, do we?” I realized it sounded like an accusation and I hadn’t intended it that way but, now that I’d said it, I wasn’t sorry. I drew back and looked up at his face.

  “Well, no. I mean, yes, I believe I heard someone say it happened at about one or two a.m.”

  “They only know it was before four a.m. That’s when Kathryn Gaskill and I found the … when we went out on the back deck.”

  “Perhaps I misunderstood.” Malcolm turned his head.

  Nigel Endicott had slipped up behind him and tapped on his shoulder. He was cutting in.

  Malcolm handed me off to Nigel with a polite but grudging, “Certainly.”

  Nigel Endicott’s hand was cold and damp and he held me as if I were made of whipped cream. Searching for something to say, I came up with, “Kathryn said you’re from New Hampshire, right?”

  “Vermont.”

  So much for that. Over Nigel’s shoulder, I located Marco, still sitting at our table. Ernestine had moved in and now stood a few feet away from him, gushing and flouncing like a teeny-bopper. Heather still sat at their table, staring at the dance floor.

  “When I met you yesterday, I’d been talking to Kathryn for a few minutes but I didn’t know she was the woman whose husband was murdered,” Nigel said.

  “I see. Yes, I was surprised to find her on deck that morning. The day before, she’d stayed in her room and only came out for dinner at my insistence.”

  “How is she doing now?”

  “It’s hard to tell. I had dinner with her tonight, but she didn’t say much.”

  “You were just dancing with the Englishman I heard was playing cards with Kathryn’s husband that evening. Does he have any suspicions?”

  The abruptness with which he changed the subject startled me. “Well, no. Security has talked to him, I’m sure, but I’ve no idea what he told them.”

  “And what a shame about the poor photographer being killed. Didn’t your friend, the man you’re with tonight, help the police with it?”

  “We both happened to be in the area at the time. So Marco, being a police officer himself, stayed behind to help. Just with crowd control, though.” I wondered how he knew about Marco helping them. Maybe Nigel had been in the group gathered at the end of the alley. The group Marco had been pushing back when Lettie, Ollie, and I walked past them on our way back to the ship.

  “So he didn’t talk to them about the crime itself? Do they know what the motive was?”

  “If they do, he didn’t tell me about it.” I felt Nigel’s right hand quiver against my back. This poor man is scared to death, I thought.

  The song ended before Nigel could ask me any more probing questions, but as we turned to leave the dance floor, Malcolm Stone, again, popped up behind and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Dotsy? One more dance before the band takes a break?”

  “I’m sorry, Malcolm. I think I’ll go back to my table now.” I’d been away from Marco too long, basking in the glow of my sudden popularity. Marco would probably have something pointedly sarcastic to say and I told myself to take it gracefully.

  But he didn’t. He was gone.

  I sat at our table and waited for fifteen minutes. Long enough to be certain he hadn’t simply gone to the men’s room. Ernestine Ziegler watched me, I noticed, by cutting her eyes my direction without turning her head. Malcolm joined Brittany and Willem at their table and Nigel Endicott disappeared. The band left for their break.

  I took the elevator down to my room, phoned Marco’s room, and let it ring seven times. Leaving him a message to call me back, I stood in the middle of my room and tried to think what I should do next. Check the other bars and lounges? The casino? The security office? Marco might have dropped in there to see if there was any news. Using the elevator again, I checked every public gathering-spot I knew of, ending up in the observation bar on Zeus deck. No Marco anywhere.

  I’d really done it now.

  I walked around the bubble-top gymnasium, from which the plonk of bouncing balls still emanated, to the aft rail and looked down on the outdoor pool of the Poseidon deck. The wind blew my hair across my face. A half-dozen children still cavorted in the bottom-lit pool, playing Marco Polo. Ouch. That name. Parents sipping drinks at tables and shivering children wrapped in towels watched the game in the water as white-jacketed waiters wandered around, picking up glasses from abandoned tables.

  How could I have been so stupid? Marco had given me plenty of warning he was losing patience with me. You can’t expect a man to put up with cold shoulders forever. I had turned away from his kiss this morning on the launch boat to Patmos, slipped away like some kind of scared rabbit that first evening on the promenade deck when all he’d done was try to hold my hand, and now, tonight, I’d acted cozier with every man who’d asked me to dance than I had with him.

  From Marco’s point of view, this would make no sense. I’d never discussed my past with him. He might really think it was all about the beard. I was ashamed of myself. Stop it, Dotsy! You’re acting like a victim. Now, lighten up and let Marco touch you. Unless he’s had it with you already.

  With nowhere else to check, I decided to make one trip around the promenade deck and turn in for the night. I took the elevator down, considered knocking on Lettie and Ollie’s door, then thought better of it and shoved open the heavy teak doors to the outside deck. Greek Bouzouki music drifted down from somewhere above.

  I turned left and walked toward the back end of the ship. A few wooden lounge chairs were still out, the rest stowed away for the night. In the daytime, the bulkhead was lined with cushioned chairs. Most of the ship’s outside lighting was directed toward the water, leaving the deck itself in dim shadow. I stepped carefully to avoid tripping over a chair.

  As I turned the corner, the churning water from the engines glowing green and white in the floodlights, I heard a voice behind me. I turned. It was Brittany Benson, alone now, and she was on a cell phone. Her voice shook as she almost shouted, “I know someone went through my room! I put those boxes in my closet with the arrows pointing toward the wall, and when I came back, they were pointing the other way!”

  I froze.

  “Sophie says she knows nothing about it.”

  I slipped back a little, into the deep shadow at the corner of the bulkhead. From here I could actually see Brittany if I moved my head a bit forward, but remain hidden from her as long as I stayed plastered to the wall. I prepared to hold my breath and pray as she walked past me. I might, I thought, pretend to be having a dizzy spell if she saw me. I’m afraid I’ve used my diabetes more than once to get me out of tight spots. I grab my head, wobble around, and call out for orange juice. Call it the “juice excuse.”

  Luck was with me. Brittany stopped before she rounded the corner, spun around as if the person on the other end of the conversation had said something outrageous, and plopped down on a deck chair. She turned, her back to the wind, facing my direction. Ideal, as long as she didn’t see me. I decided to risk it and hang around, even though the longer I lurked in the shadow the harder it would be to explain if she caught me.

  “No, nothing’s been taken . . . I have my suspicions . . . This woman I’ve seen talking to Dr. Girard and Sophie. She’s from Virginia . . . No, I haven’t. I talked to her for one minute before we went ashore in Mykonos. Why? Because she’s friends with the Carabinieri captain from Italy, and because she’s been checking out the stuff in the display
cases. She’s got some sort of book . . . and she’s the one who hooked Sophie up with Girard. Sophie’s his assistant now.”

  There followed a long silence before she said, “Yeah, okay. She’s an older woman, salt-and-pepper sort-of hair. Kind of short, but not too short.”

  To whom was she describing me and why? I felt a sudden need to go to the bathroom. My heart pounded so loudly I could hardly hear Brittany. There was another long pause.