Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  Sophie nodded vigorously.

  I looked at my watch. “I think this sounds great but, Sophie, don’t you need to scoot? You’re supposed to be on stage in three minutes.”

  “Oh!” She jumped up, toppling the brass compass on a stand beside her chair and launching it on a new search for north. She lunged forward and caught it before it hit the floor.

  Girard watched as she righted the compass, patted it affectionately, and backed through the door to the deck, apologizing under her breath all the way.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said. “I think.”

  “You’re quite a detective, Dr. Girard. You already knew Sophie was an archaeology enthusiast.”

  “I also know she comes from a very poor family and she has a lot of potential. As a scholar.”

  Why, I wondered, did he find it necessary to add those last three words? I picked up the box with the diadem and looked at it more closely. The craftsmanship was superb. I hefted it in my hand and felt its weight. “And speaking of detectives, do you remember our conversation before dinner about the vase? The Greek vase that’s to be returned to Italy?”

  “The Euphronios vase. Yes.”

  “Did the Italian Carabinieri have anything to do with it? I ask that because I have a friend on the ship who is a detective with the Carabinieri in Florence and he has a keen interest in stolen antiquities.”

  “I’d like to meet him. But to answer your question, no. This wasn’t a case of anything having been actually stolen, except in the sense that it was excavated illegally to begin with. It was a case of altered identity papers and misrepresentation. But the Metropolitan Museum in New York knew what they had. The question was whether or not they had to return it to Italy.”

  “I see.”

  “The Italian Carabinieri are doing great work, though. They work with Interpol very effectively.”

  “And with Scotland Yard?” I asked because Marco had mentioned working with that London-based agency.

  “Sometimes,” Girard said, and his tone of voice may have betrayed a tiny bit of Anglo-French rivalry. “This business of theft, though. There’s hardly a museum in the entire Mediterranean area that hasn’t been hit. Broken into. Looted. The Corinth Museum. Did you hear about that? Thieves broke in, beat up the night watchman, and stole hundreds and hundreds of priceless works. Look!” He jumped up and flew to the book shelves behind me. “I want to show you.”

  Girard ran his fingers along one row of books, then along the next row down. He pulled out a thin, soft-cover book and opened it. “In here they have pictures of all the items stolen from the Corinth Museum. See?” He flipped through the pages and handed me the book. In it were photos and descriptions of hundreds of vases, busts, kraters, and sculptures. “Most of these things have been found and returned, thank God.”

  “Where did they find them?”

  “Believe it or not, they were in a warehouse in Miami, Florida.” He showed me another, somewhat thicker, volume. “And this one has photos of some of the artifacts currently missing from other museums. Only museums in Greece.”

  “Incredible.”

  “They could do another one as large as this for items missing from Italy, or from Turkey, or from Egypt.”

  I thumbed quickly through the thicker book, entitled LAMBDA. I imagined LAMBDA was an acronym for something and certainly an apt title. Lambda, the Greek letter L. L for lost. I wished I had more time to study this book.

  Girard read my mind. “You may take it with you if you like. Bring it back here when you’re finished.”

  Chapter Ten

  Marco managed to weasel his way into the meeting in spite of Chief Letsos. In the small room that served as an office for shipboard security, the men directly involved in the investigations of the disappearance of George Gaskill and the murder of Nikos Papadakos were gathered. Chief of Security Letsos sat behind the desk, twisting a rubber band around his fingers, glumly chewing on a toothpick. His baby-faced assistant, Demopoulos, stood in one corner, his hands clasped behind his back. United States FBI Special Agent David Bondurant had taken one of the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk from Chief Letsos.

  Perched stiffly on the other chair was the sole policeman from Mykonos who had stayed aboard after the others had been called ashore to help with the murder probe. Murder was not an everyday occurrence on Mykonos and this particular policeman looked overwhelmed by recent events. Letsos introduced him to the others as Lieutenant Villas.

  The question was: Who’s in charge? The other question was: Of what? Special Agent Bondurant had already made it clear he considered himself in charge of the George Gaskill affair. George had been an American citizen, Bondurant had fifteen years’ experience in criminal investigation, and he had access to all the investigative tools of the FBI. Shipboard security, as Bondurant had forcefully pointed out to Letsos, had access to a pair of handcuffs and experience with scanning boarding cards.

  Technically, the photographer’s murder was the bailiwick of the Mykonos police, but Lieutenant Villas, sitting beside Bondurant, his left leg nervously bouncing, would obviously have been delighted to hand it over for any reason or none at all. His own chief, back on the island, had charged him with the task of finding out who on the ship knew what about the murder of the photographer.

  Marco had told Letsos about Kathryn Gaskill’s reaction at dinner to the name Brittany Benson. He repeated what Dotsy had told him about the Brittany vs. George court case and George’s subsequent status as a sex offender. When he suggested they look at the ship’s personnel records on Miss Benson, Letsos pawned him off on his junior officer, Demopoulos. It was while that young man was calling around to find out where personnel records were kept that Special Agent Bondurant walked in. Marco identified himself as a fellow crime-fighter, and name-dropped a couple of mutual acquaintances, other FBI attachés in Europe with whom Marco had worked.

  Meanwhile, Letsos had walked in with Villas, and it would have been rude for him to have told Marco to leave. He said it with his eyes, with a glowering glance toward the door, but Marco refused to take the hint. So there they were. The five of them.

  “They have found the knife,” Villas announced. “At least they think it’s the knife used to kill your photographer. Someone found it in the shallow water of the rocks along the bay in Little Venice.”

  “We can forget about fingerprints, then.”

  “The knife looks similar to those sold in one of the shops in Mykonos Town. When they talk to the owner of the store, they will probably know for sure.”

  “With luck, the owner will also remember who bought the knife,” Bondurant said, “or at least be able to describe the buyer.”

  Marco said, “It seems to me, as vicious as the attack was, there should have been a very bloody person running down the streets of Little Venice. Strange, no one saw him.”

  “They think the attacker may have come prepared with protective clothing. He could have taken it off and stuffed it in a bag, after he finished.” Villas looked around the room, as if for confirmation that this was a reasonable idea.

  “Did you see the body?” Marco asked. “It was a mess. Such a mess that it was either done by a person who was angry, out of control, or by a person who did not know what he was doing.”

  “Stabbing blindly?”

  “Exactly.”

  Security Chief Letsos flipped his toothpick with his tongue. “Let’s let the Mykonos police worry about that one. We have enough to worry about already. We’ve interviewed Oliver Osgood, Willem Leclercq, and Malcolm Stone. They are the three men who were playing cards with Gaskill last night. Osgood is still our best suspect, because he was with Gaskill until they parted to go to their rooms. As far as we know, he was the last person to see Gaskill alive. Those three men lost almost two thousand Euros each, but Stone and Leclercq alibi each other. They both say they didn’t leave their suite after Osgood and Gaskill left. They went to bed.”

  “But they have separate bedrooms in
their suite,” Bondurant said. Either of them could have left after the other went to bed.

  “Possible, but unlikely.”

  “Or they could be alibiing each other. One of them could be protecting the other.”

  “Possible,” Letsos repeated. “We’ve collected blood samples from the deck and we should be able to get a sample of Gaskill’s DNA from at least one of the personal items we’ve taken from his room. Drinking glass, hairbrush, razor, and such.”

  Demopoulos, still standing in the corner, cleared his throat and held up one finger. “Excuse me, sir. The hair?”

  “Oh, yes. Where is it?”

  Demopoulos drew a plastic bag off the top of the filing cabinet beside him and handed it to Letsos. Inside the transparent bag was a stringy black mass large enough to clog a sink drain.

  Letsos grimaced as he took the bag from Demopoulos and held it up. “This was pulled out of the water this morning by one of the Mykonos police boats. They began at the stern of our ship and continued on a course one hundred eighty degrees from the course we were steering last night. In other words, they were trying, as nearly as possible, to retrace our path. When they got to a spot that was approximately where we would have been at one o’clock this morning, they stopped and looked around for a while. This is all they found.” Letsos looked embarrassed, as if he expected the others to laugh.

  “What is it?” Bondurant asked.

  “It seems to be a part of a wig. Like a man’s hairpiece,” Villas said. “I was on the boat when we found it.”

  “Did Gaskill wear a hairpiece?”

  “Why was it floating? If it’s hair, shouldn’t it have sunk?”

  Letsos squeezed the bag, rose, and passed it across the desk to Bondurant. Bondurant held it up to the overhead light. He mashed it and said, “It’s greasy. It’s got so much hair oil on it, it must’ve been like a duck. Couldn’t sink! Too much oil on its feathers.”

  Marco and Bondurant laughed.

  “Our friend from the Carabinieri, here,” Letsos said, jerking his head in Marco’s general direction, “sat with Kathryn Gaskill at dinner this evening. He tells me she had a rather violent reaction when the name of one of our ship’s dancers was mentioned.” He paused, and then said. “Would you tell them, Captain Quattrocchi?”

  Marco described the dinner table scene and filled them in on the story Dotsy had told him.

  “We’d better talk to this Brittany Benson,” Bondurant said.

  “I intend to,” Letsos said as if he resented the implication he wouldn’t have thought of that himself. “She’s on stage at the moment.”

  “Could a woman have done this?”

  “Sure. A young, physically fit woman? A dancer? Versus an over-the-hill car salesman who’d had at least five drinks?”

  “It would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it? Rapist and victim meet on a ship halfway around the world from the crime?”

  “The charge may have been false,” Marco said.

  “In which case, the young woman would have no reason for revenge. It would be Mr. Gaskill who would harbor a grudge.” Bondurant glanced around at the other four, a deep furrow between his eyes. “Could either of them have known the other was on the ship?”

  “You mean before the cruise started? Not likely. But they could have bumped into each other at any time after that,” Letsos said, taking the plastic bag containing the hairpiece back from Bondurant. He held it up and, by way of dismissal, said, “We’ll see if Mrs. Gaskill can identify this tomorrow morning. She’s probably asleep by now. And we’ll try to catch Miss Benson when she leaves the stage.”

  Chapter Eleven

  A note from Marco lay on the floor inside my door. I’d forgotten he said he would wait for me in the Zeus Deck bar. I was so absorbed in the book Dr. Girard had given me, I’d found a seat between the outside doors and the stairway and sat there looking through it for some unknown period of time, unaware I hadn’t actually gone to my room. When I finally did make it back to my room, it was well after eleven, and I was dead tired. Of course I was tired! I’d been up since three a.m., with less than two hours’ sleep.

  I recognized Marco’s squared-off style of printing. I opened the note and read: “Dear Dotsy, Where are you? I am tired of drinking by myself. I am going back to the bar for a few more minutes, but I am going to leave at midnight. Marco”

  I looked up the number for the Zeus Deck bar on the telephone info card, dialed it, and left a message for Marco saying I was crashing and I’d see him in the morning.

  * * * * *

  I slept the sleep of the righteous until seven the next morning, dressed, and scanned the day’s activities in the “Oracle,” the flyer the cabin steward shoved under my door each night. We were to visit the island of Patmos today. Patmos is the traditional site where St. John the Evangelist wrote the book of Revelation. Apparently, our ship would have to anchor outside the harbor and we would need to take a small launch to shore. It was too early to wake anyone else up, so I breakfasted alone and rode the elevator up to the Zeus Deck, the top level and one I hadn’t seen yet. Except for the bar/lounge on the bow, now closed, the Zeus Deck was dominated by a large gymnasium covered with bubble-shaped skylights. The ship’s smokestack rose above the forward end of the gym. I felt a twinge of guilt when I looked at the doors to the bar. That was where I’d have met Marco last night.

  Aft of the gym, I found a small sun deck with chairs and tables scattered around. Two people sat at one table drinking coffee. With a small shock, I saw one of those people was Kathryn Gaskill and the other was the man I’d noticed in the debarkation line yesterday and pegged as “trying too hard to look casual.” I paused, turned to the rail and gazed across the water. It was blinding in the morning sun. Don’t be silly, Dotsy. Go over and talk to them, I told myself. I walked over.

  “Dotsy, this is Nigel Endicott. He’s from Vermont.”

  Nigel Endicott rose and shook my hand. A man of indeterminate age, his skin said “fifty-something,” but his hair, the gold ring in one ear, and the tattoo on one arm said “thirty-something.” He wore black-rimmed glasses and his hair, scrunched up with gel into the tousled style the young men all wore, had a sprinkling of gray mixed in with the dark.

  “Are you traveling alone, Nigel?”

  “Yes. I was just telling . . .”

  “Kathryn,” Kathryn prompted.

  “Kathryn, that since my retirement I’ve been renovating the farmhouse I bought a couple of years ago and I needed a break. I plan to spend my retirement there, ‘far from the madding crowd,’ as they say.

  “Oh, but surely you’re too young to retire.”

  “Not really retire. I’m just retiring from the rat race. I want to do organic farming and sell the results of my labor. My farmhouse is on ten acres of land.” Nigel had a trace of an English accent.

  I felt as though I shouldn’t bring up anything to do with George because I had no way of knowing whether Kathryn had told Nigel Endicott about it. It seemed logical that, unless she was deliberately avoiding the subject, she would have mentioned it the very first thing. “My husband was murdered on this ship yesterday.” Hardly the sort of thing that would slip your mind, but it occurred to me Kathryn might be in need of a break because the tension for her must be unbearable. I could see myself, in her place, heading for a deserted deck with my morning coffee. If someone did join me and want to talk, I’d stick strictly to small talk. Quite natural, I thought.

  I left them and took the stairs down three levels to the stern of the Poseidon Deck. This was where Lettie and Ollie had been heading last night for music and dancing in the area around the pool. The deck was abandoned now, so I grabbed a chair and, looking up, saw Kathryn and Nigel still sitting where I had left them. The pool area was open to the sky because the top three decks only went back part way. I moved to a chair that was closer to the bulkhead until I could see none of the upper deck, so Kathryn and Nigel wouldn’t think I was watching them.

  I hoped Ol
lie and Lettie had had a fun evening. Poor Ollie. This was the first vacation he’d had in ages, the first time he’d ever been out of the States, and here he was, a murder suspect. I didn’t need to waste a single minute wondering if he was guilty. The very idea was ludicrous.

  I wanted to know more about Leclercq and Stone, the other suspects. Why were they so anxious to get their hands on that krater of Brittany Benson’s? Why had they been so hospitable in offering their suite for a poker game with two total strangers? Ollie said they had been generous with the drinks and they had the poker table all set up when they got there.

  Antiquities. That’s what Leclercq was shopping for, wasn’t it? Funny how this was becoming a recurring theme. Leclercq, looking for ancient Greek relics to furnish a client’s new home. Stone, an antiques expert. Luc Girard, world-renowned archaeologist and authority on antiquities. Sophie Antonakos, poor girl from central Greece who, nevertheless, can pick up an antique diadem and immediately spout a scholarly discourse on it. Brittany Benson, showgirl from America, who runs around Mykonos hugging a prize antique krater.

  And the Aegean Queen, cruise ship with a theme. It flaunted genuine antiquities in showcases all over the ship.

  Okay, but was any of that connected to the murders of George Gaskill and Nikos Papadakos, our late photographer? Were the two murders connected to each other? I thought about it for a while and decided I needed to talk to my son, Charlie.

  * * * * *

  Charlie, my next-to-eldest, was principal of a high school in northern Virginia, a most trustworthy boy and an absolute straight arrow. I knew I’d have to word my request carefully because Charlie wouldn’t violate the law or even bend the rules, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what I wanted him to do was ethical. Or legal.

  I couldn’t call him now because back home it was three a.m. but I recalled passing a sort of computer room on my way out. An Internet café. It had been closed when I walked past, but now my watch said 9:05 so I decided to check again and, lucky me, it was just opening. A woman behind a desk surrounded by computer stations explained the rates to me but they all sounded expensive. You paid by the minute to access the Internet from one of their computers, and she warned me that pages took some time to download. Assuming I’d have to mess around a good bit before I managed to even get into my own email, I could see this costing a bundle.