by Aaron Elkins
“I looked in Arden’s room afterward,” John said. “Nothing was disturbed. If you heard scuffling, it came from someplace else.”
“No, I’m quite positive—”
“Are you positive? You said you were sleeping. Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Well… all right, I grant you, that could be, it might have been a dream. Let’s put aside the scuffling, then. But to suggest that it was Arden that…” She folded her arms. “No, I’m sorry.”
“Maggie,” Mel said thoughtfully, “what did he smell like? The man who threw you overboard.”
The question, like most of the others, seemed to annoy her. “What did he smell like? You mean, did he smell dirty, or—”
“Uh-uh. Arden was a steady pipe smoker, though. My brother always has a pipe in his mouth too, and the smell doesn’t just soak into his clothes and his hair, it soaks into him. It comes out of his pores. Get close to him and you can’t help smelling it. Do you remember anything like that?”
Good point, Gideon thought. Smokers do smell of their tobacco — pipe smokers more than anyone else, it seemed — and he himself had noticed the sweet, coconut-and-vanilla scent that hung around Arden.
But Maggie rejected it with an impatient shake of her head. “No, I don’t—” She stopped abruptly, staring hard at nothing, her thoughts obviously turned inward. “Oh my God,” she said slowly, looking at each of them. “I did smell it. I smelled it and didn’t realize what it was. I thought it was something Cisco smoked, something familiar… marijuana… only it didn’t quite smell like marijuana. Sweetish, yes, but different. I guess I assumed it was something else like that, I don’t know, something from around here. But it wasn’t. It was Arden’s Sultan’s Blend — he gets it from England — how could I not have realized it? It just never occurred to me to think that… that…”
She was rocking her head back and forth, hands steepled in front of her mouth. “My God… it’s so unbelievable… Arden. But why?”
TWENTY-ONE
BUT why?
That was the question that absorbed them for the remainder of dinner, but no persuasive or even credible answers emerged, and the flow of ideas slowed and eventually stopped. Everybody was tired. Everybody had missed most of the previous night’s sleep. Once the rice-pudding dessert was finished, people began leaving, talking about getting to bed early. There would be no convivial gathering under the stars that night. In the morning they would reach Leticia, and nobody knew what awaited them when the police were informed of the bizarre goings-on of the last few days. John had told them that they might all very well be detained — they would certainly be interrogated — and it wouldn’t hurt to be well rested. The Colombian police did not rank among the world’s most considerate forces.
Phil went off to wash clothes, John disappeared somewhere, and Gideon went to the ship’s “library,” a two-foot shelf of fly-specked novels in German, Spanish, and English, apparently none of them less than fifty years old. He found a dusty copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and took it out to the salon, hoping to read for a couple of hours in the early evening breeze and calm his mind. It had been a hell of a day. But the posture he chose — sprawled back in one chair, with his feet propped on another, proved too comfortable. It wasn’t long before the book fell open on his lap and dropped to the deck.
“Hey… Doc.” John was shaking his shoulder.
He had been deeply, dreamlessly asleep. “What time is it?” he said, unwilling to open his eyes.
“What time is it? It’s seven o’clock. What difference does it make what time it is?” He was brimming with impatience and enthusiasm. “Come on, you’ve been snoozing for an hour. Open your eyes, wake up — I got something to show you. Come on. Hey.” More shaking.
Gideon grumpily brushed at his hand. “Okay, okay, don’t nag.” He squeezed his eyes open one at a time, reluctantly pulled his feet from the chair, stretched, and stood up.
John was standing there, bouncing on his toes and holding a manila envelope. Beside him was Phil, looking scrawnier than ever in nothing but his baggy shorts and a pair of flip-flops.
“All my shirts are in the sink,” he explained.
“Really? All both of them?” Gideon yawned and stretched once more. “All right, I’m awake. What’s all the excitement?”
“Don’t ask me,” Phil said. “Ask him. He practically dragged me out of my room by the scruff of my neck.” He frowned. “Do people have scruffs?”
“Well, see, the whole thing didn’t make sense to me,” John said, herding them toward the stairwell, “so I’ve been wandering around looking at things, trying to see everything, you know, from a fresh angle. I went to look at Scofield’s room again, I looked at Cisco’s room, I went over the ship pretty much from top to bottom, to see what I could see. And I found something up on the roof that changes everything.”
“The roof?” Gideon repeated. “Where does the roof come into it?”
“That’s what I’m going to show you. I want witnesses.” And then, portentously: “You’ll probably have to give depositions later.”
Once on the roof, he took them to the rearmost part, where Scofield had isolated himself behind the smokestack in the evenings. The sun was still above the horizon, but it had dropped below the evening cloud bank and it was tolerable to be out in the open, especially in the breeze that came up every late afternoon.
“Oops.” One of Phil’s flip-flops had caught on one of the stanchions to which the two guy wires that secured the smokestack were attached.
“Watch out, Phil!” John exclaimed. “And for Christ’s sake, keep away from the other one!” This exhortation, emphatic enough to begin with, was made still more forceful by his grabbing Phil by the elbows, lifting him bodily, and setting him down three feet to the right. “In fact, don’t move. Jesus.”
Phil docilely allowed himself to be transported, but looked puzzled. “What’s the big deal?”
“Give me a minute and you’ll see. Look around, you guys. What do you notice that’s different?”
“From?” Gideon said. He brushed at a waft of gritty smoke that had drifted down from the smokestack.
John waved it away too. “From what it was last night, and the night before, and the night before that. What’s changed?”
Gideon and Phil looked around them. “Where exactly are we supposed to be looking?” Phil asked.
“Right here. Right where we’re standing.”
“Well,” said Phil, “this is where Scofield was, right?”
John nodded. “Right. Sitting right here in his beach chair.”
Phil shrugged. “Give us a hint.”
“I just gave you a hint.”
“Here’s his teapot and his cup, still on the floor,” Gideon said, “and a plate with some crumbs in it. Well, the cup’s on its side, is that what you mean?”
“That probably figures in it, but no, that’s not what I mean.”
Gideon spread his hands. “I don’t know, John. How about letting us in on it?”
John folded his arms somewhat crossly. “For a guy who sure loves to take his time when he’s telling other people about his brilliant deductions, you’re a little impatient when you’re on the other end of it.”
Gideon saw the justice in this. “I beg your pardon. Please continue.”
“Where’s his chair, Doc?”
Gideon scowled. “His, uh, chair.”
“Yeah, his chair.”
“I don’t know. I guess somebody moved it.”
“Really? Look around. Nobody’s moved any of the others. They’re all where they were last night, roughly anyway. There’s where we were, there’s where—”
“Okay, so somebody took it downstairs.”
“Why would anyone carry a beach chair downstairs? Except for the dining room and the salon, this is the only place there’s enough room for it. And I already checked the dining room and the salon. It’s not there. Besides, who’s gonna have the nerve to take away Scofi
eld’s chair?”
“All right, then, maybe the crew was up here cleaning up.”
“They cleaned up his chair, but they didn’t clean up the teapot and cup that he left on the floor? Nope, no good. Besides, I talked to Vargas. The crew hasn’t done any work at all up here. He didn’t even know we were using the roof.”
“Okay, already, we give up,” said Phil. “Where is it?”
“In the river,” John said triumphantly, “probably a good hundred or hundred and fifty miles back.”
“And why is that?” asked Gideon.
“Because somebody threw it in… along with Scofield.”
“You’ve lost me,” Phil said.
“It wasn’t Scofield that tossed Maggie overboard,” John said. “It couldn’t have been. He was already in the river. Someone threw him in too.”
“But she smelled his pipe tobacco,” Phil pointed out.
“Maybe she smelled someone else’s pipe tobacco,” John said. “Or maybe she imagined it. She imagined she heard scuffling, didn’t she? No, Arden was gone. Dead.”
“And you know this, how?” asked Gideon.
“Well, I don’t know it—” He smiled. “It’s what you’d call an ‘unverified supposition,’ of which you’ve made plenty, Doc — but it all adds up, and it explains a few things too. Scofield’s room hadn’t been slept in last night, remember? Well, the reason’s obvious: he never went to bed, probably never went back to his room at all. He was up here, probably asleep—”
“Probably zonked out of his mind,” amended Phil.
“Probably, which would have made it even easier for someone to throw him off.”
“But why?” Gideon asked.
“And who?” said Phil.
John shook his head. “That I can’t tell you. I’m not there yet.”
“And what then? Then he, whoever it was and for whatever reason, went downstairs and Maggie heard him, and he threw her over too? And then jumped in himself?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m assuming. Unless more than one person was involved, which is something to keep in mind.”
“But how did he get back on the ship?” Gideon asked. “When we got Maggie out of the water, everybody was standing there, perfectly dry. Everybody except Scofield.”
John shrugged. “Hey, look, all I can tell you is what I can tell you.”
“Why get rid of the chair?” Phil asked.
“Ah, see, that’s a crucial part of it. Scofield must have been cracked on the head, or knifed, or something that involved blood, and naturally it got on the chair. So it had to go too, or somebody was sure to realize what happened. Now, then — What?” he said in response to the dubious looks being directed at him. “You don’t buy it?”
“It’s not that I don’t buy it,” Phil said gingerly. “It’s plausible. That is, it’s not implausible, but—”
“John, I think what Phil is getting at is that we could use a little verifiable supposition at this point,” Gideon said. “What are we supposed to be witnesses to? What are we going to be deposed on? A chair that wasn’t there?”
“If you guys would let me finish, you’d find out.” He cleared his throat. “Now, gentlemen, may I direct your attention to the, what do you call it, the stanchion… no, not the one you got caught on, Phil. The other one.”
They looked at it. Like its companion six feet away, it was a foot-long piece of angle iron attached at its bottom end to a metal plate, which was then solidly bolted to the floor — that is, to the top of the roof. Two parallel holes had been drilled in its upper end, and through them one of the two guy wires that stabilized the smokestack had been pulled, knotted, and snipped off.
“Not the stanchion itself,” John said, when there was no response, “the floor near it. Over here.”
“These spots, you mean?” Phil asked. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Damn right, that’s what I’m talking about. Doc, what do they look like to you?”
Gideon shrugged. “Could be anything.”
“Pretend you’re a famous forensic anthropologist. Pretend you’re looking for clues.”
“Well, I know what I’m supposed to think. I’m supposed to think that’s blood, right? And it could be blood, I guess.” Hands on his knees, he leaned closer. “Could also be old tomato juice or ketchup or—”
“What would ketchup be doing up here?” Phil asked. “They don’t even use ketchup in Peru.”
“That’s not the point,” John said petulantly. “The thing is, I’m betting it is blood, and I’m betting it’s Scofield’s. See, there’s some more spatter over here, right on the very edge. It was nighttime. Whoever did this wouldn’t have seen them and wouldn’t have worried about them anyway, because who’s going to notice a few spots on the floor?”
“But you did,” said Gideon.
“Damn right I did. I already took pictures, and I wanted you to witness the spots before I collected the blood. I’d be real surprised if a DNA test doesn’t show it’s Scofield’s.”
Gideon nodded doubtfully. “Well, a DNA test would settle it, all right. That’ll be a long time coming, though.”
“The blood’s all dry,” Phil said. “How do you collect dried blood?”
“Not a problem,” John said. “Watch and learn.”
From the manila envelope he took some things he had gotten from Vargas: a single-edged razor blade, several sheets of white paper, and a few letter-size envelopes, the latter items bearing an impressive, thickly embossed Amazonia Cruise Lines logo.
With the razor he scraped the crusty brown spots near the stanchion onto one of the sheets, and the ones near the edge of the roof onto another. Both sheets were then folded and refolded to keep the material inside, and put into the smaller envelopes, which were then placed in the larger manila one.
“You’ll notice that I didn’t seal the envelopes yet,” he explained for Phil’s benefit. “I’ll use some water from the sink instead of licking them. I don’t want to take a chance of contaminating them with my DNA.”
“I knew that,” Phil said.
The manila envelope and its contents were deposited on one of the alcove shelves in John’s cabin. His air-conditioner, which the heat-loving John had previously set at mid-range, was now turned up to máximo. “The cops better appreciate this,” he said. “I’m gonna freeze tonight.”
“Yeah,” Gideon said, “the temperature might plummet all the way down to ninety. Maybe Vargas can get you a couple of blankets.”
TWENTY-TWO
“I’M still having trouble with the pipe tobacco,” Phil said. “Maggie seemed pretty sure she smelled it.”
“After someone suggested it to her,” Gideon pointed out.
They had gone from John’s cabin, barely big enough to hold the three of them, to the deserted salon, first stopping at the dining room buffet table to bring out glasses of water and a basket of fruit to snack on — bananas, tangerines, and some objects that looked like cucumbers, but which Phil said had fluffy insides that tasted like lemon-flavored cotton candy, which they did.
“Yeah, someone,” John said, and looked meaningfully up at them from the tangerine he’d been peeling. “Mel.”
“But she even knew the brand,” Phil said.
“Sure, that’s what she thinks now. But you have to remember, she was in a state of shock at the time. She didn’t remember any smell until Mel brought it up.”
“So you’re voting for Mel?” Gideon said.
“No, but I wouldn’t rule him out either. He was pretty ticked off at him over the book, don’t forget that.”
“Tell me someone who wasn’t ticked off at him,” Phil said. “What about the screwing over he was giving Tim on his dissertation?”
“That’s true,” John agreed. “And Duayne had something against him too.”
“He did?” said Phil.
“Oh, sure, you could see it right off,” Gideon said. “When Scofield started talking about his daughter — Duayne’s daught
er — Duayne looked as if he wanted to kill him then and there.”
“Oh yeah, you guys mentioned that before. I never noticed it.”
Gideon smiled. That was the way Phil was, quick to see the good side of people, unobservant to the point of obtuseness about seeing the other. “I assume she told her father some things about Scofield’s behavior that got him upset.”
“Not too hard to imagine what,” John said. “Okay, so if they all had it in for Scofield—”
“Yes, but who had it in for Maggie?” Gideon asked. “That’s the problem I’m having with this. Why try to get rid of her too? What was that all about? When we all thought it was Cisco, it made some sense because Cisco was batty enough to do anything. But now we know it wasn’t Cisco, and if your hypothesis is correct John — about Scofield’s having been dumped off the boat from the roof — then that means that whoever did it then came downstairs to the cabin deck and stood around making some kind of noise until Maggie came out of her room, at which point he grabbed her and tossed her in the river. Why? What kind of sense does that make? Now if Maggie—”
“The three best-looking guys on the ship talking about me?” said Maggie, who had come downstairs with her empty liter bottle of water. “Be still, my heart.”
John laughed. “How’s the ankle doing, Maggie? I see you took off the bandage.”
“Oh, that. It’s fine, not nearly as bad as it looked. See?” She put her foot up for inspection on a chair and indeed, with the blood wiped away, it could be seen to be a nice, clean gash, as gashes went: no abraded, torn edges, no nasty, radiating pink tentacles of infection, no deepening, blue-brown bruising of the surrounding skin.
“Looks good,” Gideon agreed. “But I’d still keep it covered, if I were you. It’s open, and a lot of strange things grow down here.”
