[Scarlet Wilson 05] - Miz Scarlet and the Perplexed Passenger

by Sara M. Barton

  “You’re on!”

  “You’re damn right I’m on!”

  “The clock is ticking. We arrive at nine in the morning. Be prepared to meet the press as you disembark.”

  “Perfect. I’ll be able to tell them all about how you refused to consider this case might have a different suspect. By the time I’m done spilling the beans, seasoned defense attorneys across America will be begging Kathleen to let them take her case. They’ll sue you and your team for putting her in harm’s way, failing to protect her from a dangerous stalker, and ruining her stellar reputation with innuendoes and false claims. She’ll be awarded millions!” I crowed. I turned to my shocked companions. “Let’s go, Kenny and Kathleen. We have a lot of work to do!”

  “Yes, you do. Run along now, dear, and solve the case!” said the irritating security expert, waving his big man hands in the air in his effort to shoo me away. “Don’t keep us all in suspense!”

  I was about to launch into a rebuttal when I felt Kenny’s hand grip my wrist so tightly, I thought I’d have a permanent impression of his fingerprints on my skin. “You heard the man, Miz Scarlet. We have to go solve our case.”

  “Of all the nerve!” I was still sputtering as we made our way through the maze of ship passageways. “What a jerk!”

  “But in his defense,” I heard Kathleen say. Turning around, I stopped to stare at her, suddenly confused.

  “What?”

  “He’s right about the appearance of guilt,” she admitted reluctantly. “It’s there. If I was an insurance investigator and I saw the basic facts of George’s death on a report, I wouldn’t encourage the insurance company to pay the claim.”

  “No good investigator ever relies only on a few circumstantial facts, Kathleen,” I said huffily. She was not helping her own case by playing devil’s advocate. That kind of attitude could put her permanently behind bars. “Did Marley or anyone else on the security team even question you about what happened, to hear your side of things?”

  “Well, no....”

  “The minute he heard your room was broken into, Marley Hornsby didn’t consider you might be the victim of yet another crime occurring on his ship, did he? He was still determined to convict you as a willing participant in your husband’s murder. I want to know why.”

  There had to be a reason for all this, but what was it? I thought about Marley’s supposed suspect, the middle-aged owner of the Caulkins Cove Insurance Agency. Did she fit the profile of an agile, cold-blooded assassin?

  Physically, she wasn’t a good candidate, given the extra twenty or so pounds she carried on a small frame. Kenny and Marley had told me George Delaney was a rather large man, in more ways than one -- not only tall, but with a substantial girth. Would Kathleen have had the necessary stamina to power-lift her husband over the railing and into the deep blue sea? It might have been possible, except for one thing. In the dining room just a short time ago, I had observed Kathleen constantly shifting in her seat as she tried to get comfortable. Our eyes had met over the salad course.

  “Is everything okay?” I had asked her. “You look like you’re in pain.”

  “I’m sorry about the squirming. I had a knee replacement a few months ago, and I’m still working my way back from that,” she had announced. “This trip was supposed to be therapeutic for me.”

  The debilitating nature of her problem was obvious, begging the question of whether a woman with a recent knee replacement could bear the strain of maneuvering a dead weight, in the form of a corpse, upwards of four feet and over an obstacle like a railing. Thinking back, I couldn’t recall hearing anyone groan in agony or notice any sounds of fumbling in the seconds before that lifeless figure flew past our balcony.

  Leave it to Kenny to come up with a plausible explanation for Marley’s bad behavior. “He’s trying hard to tidy up the case before we reach Bermuda, honey. He’d prefer to have Kathleen as his chief suspect.”

  Knowing that Thaddeus was next door with Laurel, he opened the door of Stateroom 6613 and led us over to the sitting area overlooking the promenade. He waited until we were settled on the sofa before he sprawled out on the window seat. I picked up the thread of the conversation.

  “If he takes her off the list, he’s still got to worry about a killer roaming aboard the Liberty of the Seas, doesn’t he?” I inquired. The grim-faced man sitting across from me nodded. “In other words, he’s in denial until the next body surfaces. That’s a rather dangerous mistake to make if George Delaney was randomly targeted. What if the victim was just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  Kenny watched me closely. I could tell he thought my theory had merit. “You’re suggesting this was a crime of convenience, Scarlet? For some reason, the killer saw an advantage to killing George?”

  “Why not? It makes a whole lot more sense to me than Kathleen being our murderer.”

  “Thank you, Scarlet,” she said, lightly patting my knee as I sat beside her. “I appreciate your vote of confidence.”

  “That brings us back to motive,” Kenny decided. “I think we can probably rule out love, hate, or revenge, since the Delaneys don’t strike me as being ruthless people.”

  She smiled sadly, her eyes filling with tears, when she heard that. Reaching over to the coffee table, she extracted a couple of tissues and dabbed her cheeks before speaking.

  “My husband was just one of those genuine good guys. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

  I paused, considering that fact. If George Delaney was such a nice guy, why did a killer want him dead? We had no motive, and without one, it would be nearly impossible to find the person who committed this heinous crime.

  “What if we look at this from a different angle? Let’s just focus on the elements of the act itself. What’s a plausible motive for killing a good man?”

  “Maybe George caught someone in the act of committing a crime,” Kenny suggested.

  “My husband was a man of conscience. He would have tried to stop him.”

  “Okay, let’s say George interrupted a crime and felt compelled to do something about it. At the risk of being obvious, doesn’t it strike you that this wasn’t a particularly well-planned crime?” I asked them. “It seems impulsive...spur of the moment...almost like the murderer panicked.”

  “That’s possible,” Kenny agreed. “Usually a murderer reacts; he gets sloppy when he’s too emotional to think straight because he’s between a rock and a hard place.”

  “But why break into Kathleen’s stateroom? What would he hope to gain from his actions?” I looked at Kenny, but he just shrugged. Kathleen suddenly sat up.

  “Maybe he’s a thief and he was looking for something to steal,” she offered, “such as our travel credit card.”

  “You have a special credit card for this trip?”

  “Sure. With all the fraud going on these days, George didn’t want to get a nasty surprise when we got home. He set up a bank account we used whenever we travel...traveled. That’s how we always knew how much our vacations cost us, from start to finish. I’d make the deposits. Whatever money I saved by clipping coupons and shopping for bargains at the grocery store and elsewhere was the amount I added to the bank account every month. We thought of it as our reward for being savvy consumers.”

  “That’s a clever idea.” He glanced over at me and I found myself wondering if Kenny was tucking the idea away in his “if we ever get married” file. I steered the conversation back to the topic at hand.

  “Maybe he thought George had something of his, something that could incriminate him,” I speculated, “some kind of evidence. But why would he leave such a mess in Kathleen’s stateroom? Did he want you to be intimidated and scared?”

  “Maybe he just didn’t have time to do a methodical search. He could have been interrupted...or afraid he might be,” the widow suggested hopefully.

  I thought about that for a minute before answering. “He killed his victim and dumped him during the daylight hours, risking dis
covery. The smarter option would have been to wait until dark. Tonight, he broke into Kathleen’s stateroom and blew through there like a human tornado, looking for something, but he did it only after she left with me to go down to my stateroom. Again, that’s a risky act. How did he know Kathleen and I weren’t coming right back? Was he watching her?”

  “Oh no!” The woman sitting beside me gave a little shiver. The thought that she was being stalked by a determined murderer obviously frightened her.

  “Unfortunately, it seems more likely than not,” Kenny replied, keeping his voice steady. “What time do the stewards start their turn-down service on Deck 7? We’ll have to find out if they were in the vicinity at the time. Maybe someone saw him.”

  “Do you think the murderer is a passenger with a stateroom on Deck 7?” she inquired.

  “Not necessarily. Don’t forget that your husband was thrown overboard from a different deck and from a different side of the ship.” Kenny reached into his pocket and extracted a small, narrow spiral notebook and flipped it open to a blank page. “Can you tell us what you and your husband did, from the moment you stepped onboard right up to the last time you saw George?”

  “Gosh, that’s a long list.”

  “Give it your best shot,” he encouraged her, as he pulled out one of his trademark miniature ballpoint pens with the Mercer Security logo emblazoned on it from the same pocket. He clicked the button on the top with his big thumb and the nib popped out to record her answers in gel ink. “It may be important.”

  Kathleen took a deep breath and slowly let it out, as if preparing herself for the experience. There hadn’t even been time to tuck away those mental postcards of their last vacation together in her memory scrapbook.

  “We boarded the ship in Bayonne, put our tote bags in our stateroom, and then went down to the Schooner Lounge on Deck 4 to snag a couple of seats for the trip down the Hudson River. We stayed long enough to have a couple of daiquiris. I think it was about 5:30 when we left. Back in the cabin, the steward had delivered our luggage, so we unpacked and then got dressed for dinner. George put on his new sport coat. He looked so handsome in it.”

  It must be difficult to go back over the last hours you spent with the man you love when your feelings are still so raw All you can remember is the look in the eyes of a man who sat across from you at the breakfast table.

  “Just before six, we found our way to the Botticelli Dining Room. Um, what happened next?” She paused, searching through the snippets of memories from the prior evening. I wondered if she regretted not paying closer attention to the comings and goings of the people she had met on the ship, but why would she have thought it was important at the time? She had no way of knowing her husband would be going home in a body bag.

  There had to be a turning point, an unknown moment when things went bad for George and a killer made up his mind to commit murder. What was it? And where did the knife come from -- did the man conceal it in his luggage? I made a mental note to ask Kenny for a detailed description of the murder weapon. Surely that was important to the case.

  The sound of Kathleen’s voice brought me back to the subject at hand. She was telling us about the meal they shared with strangers.

  “Jim and Louise were already seated when we arrived at our assigned table. They’re from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He’s a retired salesman, she’s still teaching high school English. We had a nice chat while we waited for the rest of the passengers assigned to our table to show up. About five minutes later, a delightful young couple from Brooklyn appeared. Lan’s in finance and Jade’s a stay-at-home mom with a pair of toddlers. She’s got a ‘mommy blog’ that’s quite successful. By the time our cocktails were served, we were joined by a single woman named Judi, who told us she was traveling alone, and an elderly gentleman named Lou, who was recently widowed. He and his wife lived in Raritan, New Jersey for almost sixty years, but now he’s got an apartment near his oldest daughter. I felt sorry for him because it was so obvious he missed his wife. They used to take a couple of cruises a year. I don’t think Judi told us anything about herself. Is that relevant?”

  “Not necessarily. Her reluctance to share her life story could be perfectly normal behavior. Some people don’t like to talk about themselves for a variety of reasons. She’s seeing a married man, she has a job that requires security, or she’s just a little reticent to share personal information because she’s a woman traveling alone.”

  “Good point,” I told him. Kenny’s explanation actually made a lot of sense to me.

  “Oh, I didn’t think of that,” she admitted. “You’d think I would, given all the years I was single.”

  “So, nothing out of the ordinary happened during dinner?” Kenny prompted her. “No strange conversations or tension among guests?”

  “I don’t think so, other than someone complained about the beef being a little tough.”

  “What did you and George do after dinner?” I inquired, curious about the couple. Kathleen didn’t strike me as a wild party girl by any stretch of the imagination. She was too sensible. I suspected her husband was the same way. That probably meant that while they were on vacation, they ate, slept, and played together. A moment later, Kathleen confirmed this.

  “We went to the casino for some video poker.”

  “How did that go?” Considering my own experience with electronic gambling machines, I assumed the house came out ahead.

  “The first half hour was good. I won about fifty bucks. George hit the jackpot a couple of times, to the tune of a hundred and twenty dollars. Then our luck went south. We figured out we lost about forty bucks between us and that was our limit for the evening,” she shrugged, pulling her lips into a sad smile. “That’s when George suggested we go up to the Viking Crown Lounge and try our luck at drinking.”

  “Did that go better?” Kenny interjected into the conversation. I could see he was trying to keep the tone light to elicit information. This was no brutal interrogation. He was definitely the good cop. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if he and Marley had planned this, but then I pushed the idea out of my mind. Kenny was too bitter about his high school friend’s behavior towards the late Jillian to partner up with the jerk.

  “Oh, it definitely did! We had a great time. There was a couple from Boston who had been on the ship six times, and they filled us in on all the fun things to do. What were their names?” She stopped to consider. “Debbie and Rob. They have a stateroom on Deck 10. Did you know that if you stay on the floors with the fancy suites, you get better service? Rumor has it the cruise line puts the most experienced staff on those floors. Rob told us their stewardess, Kat, took great care of them on their cruise to Mexico last year, making sure they had everything they needed. He was very impressed that Kat greeted them yesterday by name. She even remembered they like extra towels in their bathroom, because Rob always does a big workout in the middle of the day and showers twice.”

  “Okay. What did you do after you left the lounge?” he continued, still scribbling in his little pocket notebook.

  “Well, by then it was after ten. George and I are normally early birds, up at the crack of dawn. We went back to our stateroom and went to bed.”

  “So, nothing seemed unusual to either of you on the first night? No odd happenings in the middle of the night? You didn’t hear some violent argument in another cabin or wake up in the middle of the night because of unexpected noise?”

  Kathleen thought about it for a few seconds before shaking her head. “No.”

  “Okay. How did this morning start out for you two?”

  “We had breakfast in the Rembrandt dining room. George left for a walk after we ate. I’d have gone with him, but I was having trouble with my knee.” She looked down at the offending limb. It was easy to imagine her remorse, the “if only I had been there” feeling. Would that have prevented George’s killer from acting, or would there have been two victims? We’d never know.

  Chapter Seven --

  “W
hat did you do while he was gone?” Kenny asked gently, trying to get her back to the details. There would be plenty of time to work through the excruciating emotions once the bad guy was apprehended.

  “I took a cup of coffee back to the stateroom and sat out on the balcony, reading my book.”

  “Was George gone long?” I wondered. “Did he seem upset when he returned?”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s when he told me about running into the man he thought he knew. He sat with me for a little while and then he excused himself to go up to Deck 8. He said he wanted to check something out at Royal Caribbean Online. He seemed really distracted.”

  Kenny and I exchanged surprised glances. If George needed to visit the ship’s Internet café, he might have discovered important information. Was this the break in the case we needed?

  “How long was he gone?” I probed, wondering how this puzzle piece fit into the mystery of George Delaney’s horrific death.

  “Oh,” she said, running a finger along her left eyebrow, “about twenty minutes. When he came back, he was really restless and told me he wanted to work off his breakfast with the golf simulator up on Deck 13.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him?” I asked confidently, expecting her to nod.

  “Heavens no, that was at least two hours later, after we had lunch together at Brasserie 30 and went back to the stateroom to change into our suits.”

  There it was -- a big, fat time gap, between George’s run-in with an unnamed man and the unfortunate stabbing hours later. Had Marley and the security team missed it by not asking the right questions?

  “Kenny, did you know all this?” I turned to him, waiting for an answer. His eyes narrowed slightly as he sat there, searching his logical mind for some semblance of a reasonable response; unfortunately there wasn’t one.

  “No,” was all he said. That determined look on his face told me Kenny was now on the hunt, seeking those elusive facts that would build a case against the real killer. “Kathleen, did you tell anyone at all about George’s trip to Deck 8 to use the ship’s Internet service or about how upset he seemed?”