Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  The other thing Gregor had wanted, and got, was a private meeting with Jonathan Edgewick Baird. He would have preferred to have had that meeting someplace else besides this small room with Charlie Shay’s body in it, but every time he’d tried to figure out where, the logistics had been too rough. Going to the deck above only invited interruption. At the least, he’d have had Tony Baird hanging over their shoulders, making threatening rumbles in the back of his throat. Going to the main deck wasn’t the answer, either. The storm was dying down by the second, but it was still cold up there, and wet, and every enclosed place had a crew member in it. Gregor supposed there were other empty cabins on this deck, but he didn’t know where they were. It was easier just to stay where he was.

  The one thing he did do was to light another candle. It was sitting in the holder on the opposite side of the doorway where the already lit candle was, and he lit the new one off the old, grateful for even this small sliver of extra light. Then he sat down on the low plank that had been built into the open side of the bunk to serve as a stair for someone climbing into bed and as a bench for someone who needed to sit. Jon Baird stood in the doorway, his back in the passage, waiting.

  “Well,” Gregor told him, “I take it you heard what I said to Tony, or somebody heard it and told you.”

  “About Charlie dying from strychnine? Yes, I heard it. I wasn’t very far from the door. Nobody was very far from the door. They all heard it.”

  “You realize it must have happened at dinner?”

  “I don’t realize it was strychnine, Mr. Demarkian. I think I’m with Tony on this. I know you’re supposed to be an expert, but you’re not a medical doctor and you haven’t run the tests a coroner would run to determine cause of death. You’re just speculating.”

  “Am I?”

  “Tony was right about something else, too,” Jon Baird said. “Nobody would want to kill Charlie Shay. Even his wife only wanted to divorce him, and she’s off in California or Tibet or something anyway. Charlie Shay wasn’t the kind of man who made enemies. He wasn’t even the kind of man who made good friends.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. “Of course, we’re in a better position than I thought we were going to be. I thought we were going to lose the body. Now we have the body, and we can give it to the proper authorities as soon as we can contact them. Can we contact them?”

  “Eventually.”

  “There is no radio on this boat?”

  “No.”

  “What about emergency signaling equipment? What about flares?”

  “There’s not a single thing on this boat that couldn’t have been here in the seventeenth century.”

  “But that isn’t true, is it?” Gregor insisted. “There were the chairs this morning, for one thing. There was the salad tonight. Your commitment to authenticity isn’t anywhere near monolithic.”

  “Oh, it’s monolithic all right,” Jon Baird said with feeling. “All those things you’re talking about—and there are more—all those things were Sheila’s idea. Sheila’s always got ideas. It doesn’t do to thwart them.”

  “So you’re saying that everything on this boat that is anachronistic to the seventeenth century was brought on board by your wife.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right.” It wasn’t all right at all. Gregor didn’t believe this nonsense for a minute. After all, even if the salad had been Sheila Baird’s idea, the salad dressing had been a Jon Baird specialty. Mark Anderwahl had said so. Still, for the moment it was better to let it drop. “Let’s go about it this way,” Gregor said. “What about making land. We have a dead body on board. Something happened to make it dead. It seems to me we ought to make contact with a police force as soon as physically possible.”

  “I agree.”

  “Then you’ll order the crew to head back to land.”

  “Well, I could,” Jon Baird said, “but it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Why not?”

  Jon Baird rocked back on his heels, smiling slightly. “Do you know why the Puritans landed in Massachusetts? They were on their way to Virginia. They got blown off course.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s supposed to mean we don’t have a modern compass on this ship. We don’t have navigating instruments. We don’t have radar or sonar or any of the rest of that. We don’t even have a motor. All we do have is the sun and the moon and the stars. Which right this minute happen to be covered by clouds.”

  “Does that mean you’re not going to do anything at all about finding us a way to contact the authorities?”

  “Not at all. I’m going to do everything I can. I’m just trying to tell you it’s not going to be much.”

  “Do you expect that to look good when we finally do get to talk to the police?”

  “I’m not sure it’s going to matter what it looks like. You know, Mr. Demarkian, there’s one thing you haven’t considered.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This ship was headed straight out to sea from the Virginia shore. It wasn’t supposed to have gone out past the twelve-mile limit, but it might have. And even if it didn’t, how is anybody going to be able to tell? Who is going to have jurisdiction here? I still say this wasn’t a murder. It’s absurd to even think Charlie Shay might have been murdered. There wouldn’t be a sane motive on earth. But as for the police—” Jon Baird shrugged. “I’ve never had much use for the police,” he admitted. “I’ve never understood how any man could take a job that was so unlikely to make him any money. I’m going up now. Are you going to come with me?”

  “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  “I’ll send First Mate Debrek along to make sure this room is locked. I’ll have him give you the key, if you want it that way.”

  “I do want it that way.”

  “I thought you would. You know, Mr. Demarkian, you really ought to be careful. I made a mistake having you here when you refused to take my money. I don’t like the kind of leverage you have when you’re not in my employ. You can make a few mistakes yourself, if you’re not careful.”

  “But I’m always careful,” Gregor said.

  Jon Baird stepped out into the passage and shook his head. In the darkness there, he looked like an evil spirit, with the power to disappear. Seconds later, he was gone.

  Gregor went back to the bunk and looked down at the face of Charlie Shay. He would stay here and wait for the first mate to lock up. He thought it was crucial. He had expected disbelief when he announced his judgment on the cause of Charlie Shay’s death. It was a judgment hard to credit, in view of Charlie Shay’s life. What he hadn’t expected was this—this meretricious horse manure.

  Gregor Demarkian knew that Charlie Shay had died from taking strychnine because he had seen enough of death from strychnine to know what he was talking about. He didn’t expect to be believed. The problem was, he had been believed, instantaneously, by both Tony Baird and Tony’s father. Their protests were not based on doubt but on plausibility, like the protests of a man who has committed the crime he has been accused of but knows it cannot be proved against him. That led to a couple of interesting conclusions, including the one that said that in that case, either Tony or Jon or the two of them together had murdered Charlie Shay. And the problem with that was—

  Gregor went to the door of the cabin, looked out, and sighed. He wished the first mate were already on the premises. He wished there were electric lights on this boat. He wished he didn’t have to go up and spend the rest of his night questioning people who were going to think, quite rightly, that he had no business asking them anything at all.

  He also wished he knew what was going on. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the situation was still lethal.

  Two

  1

  IT TOOK NEARLY HALF an hour for First Mate Debrek to arrive at the cabin where Gregor Demarkian was keeping watch over Charlie Shay’s corpse, and when he did Gregor had to give up his last hope that some sort of sensible procedure could
be established for this crime. Gregor had never really believed in the legends of men so powerful that no one around them was willing to risk their wrath for any reason whatsoever. There might have been men like that in the small Communist bloc countries before the fall of the Soviet Union, but this was America. Even J. Edgar Hoover, with his paranoia and his illegal files, had been able to go only so far, and then only against men willing to be blackmailed to keep their careers. Quite a few other men had simply told him where to put it—and got away with it, too, because if The Boss had ever tipped his hand about those files, he would have been politically dead meat. Surely Jon Baird’s crew wouldn’t be willing to sail up the Atlantic coast with the body of a possible murder victim locked into a cabin on their own deck, arousing the wrath of police departments in four or five states and the FBI and the Coast Guard just to keep the old man happy. Gregor wasn’t sure who had jurisdiction here—and, he had noticed, neither was Jon Baird—but somebody did, and a few other somebodies were going to want it. It had to be simple to convince the crew that it would be in their own best interests to ignore their orders and head immediately for land.

  It might have been simple indeed, but Gregor never got the chance to find out. He waited patiently until the small, spare man came down with his candle. He stood in the passageway while the door was locked and the key handed over. Then he said a perfectly pleasant “Good evening,” and was met by a blank stare.

  “Damn,” Gregor said. “Don’t you speak English?” Debrek said something that sounded like “Betzhitzi dem bournidin” and turned his back. Gregor winced. He knew Armenian when he heard it—he couldn’t help it—and French and German as well, but this was something convoluted and obscure. He had a terrible feeling that Jon Baird had taken on a few refugees of his own. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine—over the last six months, Baird could have picked up a few men from any of those places, and they would be perfectly safe from the importunings of friends and enemies alike. Gregor knew more than most people about refugees. He knew that if Debrek knew that what his employer was asking him to do might jeopardize his chances for a green card or a set of naturalization papers, he would abandon it as soon as he possibly could. The only problem was in getting Debrek to understand that what he was engaged in was illegal. Gregor gave it a second try. “I would like to talk to you,” he said, in a very hopeful voice. It did no good. At the sound of talking, Debrek turned and waited politely. It was the attentiveness of manners, not comprehension. When the talking was done, Debrek turned again and hurried off, toward the narrow staircase to the deck above. Gregor followed him. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

  Reaching the passenger deck, Gregor stopped, listened to the murmur coming from behind the door to the mess, and stopped to look around. All day, this long, narrow passageway had been dark. There had never been much sun even at noon, and what light had filtered through had been weak. Then, near dinnertime, some of the candles had been lit, but not many of them. They’d thrown off shadows more than light. They’d made the passageway as spooky as a closet in a haunted house. Now there was a candle in every available holder and they were all lit. The passageway was still spooky, but it was at least spooky and bright.

  Gregor walked carefully to the door of the mess and then back toward the stairs that led above and then back again, trying to remember how dark it had been and what Charlie Shay must have seen as he was making his way along here. Then he put his foot on the bottom step and began to push himself upwards even more carefully. He didn’t remember hearing any sound from this passageway after Charlie Shay had had his attack of sickness and headed for the deck above. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been any sound to hear. Gregor tested the step, stepped up, stepped down again and looked around. He thought about the mess, almost barren of decorations, and of the little row of mason jars marked “Pumpkin Rind Marmalade” in a careful Farmington script. He thought about salads and salad dressings and ships in bottles.

  “Ipecac,” he said to himself, and thought that that reminded him of Thanksgivings at home. Somebody under the age of eight was always swallowing something they shouldn’t and getting physicked up by the old ladies. He tried the step again. Then he heard a sound from farther down the corridor and turned in its direction. He had asked for everybody to sit together in the mess and wait for him, but he didn’t expect cooperation from Jon or Tony Baird. He wondered which one this was.

  As it turned out, it was neither. The figure coming toward him was Bennis Hannaford, and she had emerged from the cabin they were supposed to share. Her black hair was slipping out of its combs and her flannel shirt was unbuttoned over the turtleneck she always wore under it, but other than that she might as well have been on Cavanaugh Street. She cocked her head when she saw him and came as close as she could before she spoke, as if anything they had to say to each other ought to be secret. Gregor could only thank the good God that she didn’t go in for whispers.

  “There you are,” she said. “Everybody’s shoved together in that little room talking about you and driving themselves to distraction. Tony knows the details of all your cases and he keeps telling people about them and putting in a lot of blood. I keep telling them there hasn’t really been any blood, the one exception being the one I don’t talk about, of course, but it doesn’t matter because nobody listens to me, anyway. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Tony is in there, too?”

  “Everybody is,” Bennis repeated, “except Jon Baird himself, and I didn’t expect that. He doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of man who’s really fond of crowds. Are you going to come in now and tell us what’s going on? We’re all dying to know.”

  “What did Tony Baird say about what was going on?”

  “He said Charlie Shay had some kind of fit and died of it. What kind of fit that was supposed to be, I don’t know. I’ve seen grand mal epilepsy and the kind of convulsions people have when they’ve been taking speed and downers together, and that was neither of those. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because we all heard the fight you had with Tony and we know you think it was a murder. Strychnine.”

  “Strychnine,” Gregor agreed. He looked at the stairs again. A fine mistlike rain was coming down through the hole above his head, making Gregor feel as if his face had been painted with dew. He went a few steps upward and poked his head out into the air. Then he came down again.

  “Listen,” he told Bennis, “do me a favor. I’m going to go up on deck. I want you to go back to the mess hall door, make your way along the passage, climb these stairs, and meet me above. You’re used to boats, aren’t you?”

  “Fairly used to. It’s like horses, Gregor. It’s one of those things I was brought up to, so I know about it, but I don’t like it much. I like boats a lot better than I like subscription dances, if that’s any help.”

  “It’s not whether you like boats or not that I care about. It’s how well you move around on one. I’m always unsteady and I’m always slow. Charlie Shay, I think, was more like you. He was used to it. He could get around without struggling.”

  Bennis bit her lip. “Are you trying to figure out how long it took Charlie to get from the dining hall to the deck? If you’re going to do that, shouldn’t I slow myself down? He was an old man. I’m a lot faster than he was to begin with, and he was all bent over sick—”

  “He was also remarkably fast,” Gregor pointed out. “He was in the bow by the time I got up to the main deck. I didn’t waste much time leaving the mess hall, either.”

  “Maybe. But there was the storm. That probably slowed him down, too.”

  “Just do what I’m asking you to do, Bennis. It’s not an exact time I need, just an approximation.”

  Bennis looked doubtful, but she finally shrugged her shoulders and went back to the mess hall door. Gregor climbed up to the main deck, stepped away from the hatch, and checked his watch. Then he called down, “Now. Go.”

  Bennis must have gone. Gregor didn’t hear her in the passage, bu
t he did hear her on the stairs, and he approved. She wasn’t running, but she was keeping up a good forced walk. Her head appeared through the hatch forty-five seconds after Gregor had given her the signal. The rest of her body came on deck less than ten seconds later. “Go to the bow,” Gregor told her, and she went.

  The bow was a longer and harder trek than the one from the dining room to the deck above, but even allowing for Charlie Shay’s slower pace and the storm and all the rest of it, there was nothing to disturb the impression he’d had when he’d first come up to the passenger deck after seeing Charlie Shay’s body locked away. If he hadn’t been so caught up in chasing bodies and confronting hostile Bairds and otherwise behaving less like an Armenian-American Hercule Poirot than like an overaged Mannix, he would have seen it sooner.

  Bennis came to a stop too close to the bow’s low rail. Gregor shut his watch with a snap and motioned her away from the side.

  “Two minutes and fifteen seconds,” he told her. “Make allowances for Charlie Shay and call it three minutes.”

  “Three minutes for him to get from the mess hall to here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what?”

  Gregor smiled. “So,” he said, “I don’t know what you know about strychnine poisoning, but assuming you know absolutely nothing, I’ll tell you this. Under no circumstances did Charlie Shay make it from the mess hall to here in three minutes flat in the middle of a storm while he was in the grip of strychnine convulsions.”

  Bennis stared at him suspiciously. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Do you mean he didn’t die of strychnine poisoning? Do you mean he didn’t die of poisoning at all?”

  “Of course I don’t mean that. Charlie Shay definitely died from being fed strychnine. I saw him die. There’s nothing else like it on earth. I’m just saying it wasn’t strychnine that caused him to leave the mess hall when he did. Which, by the way, makes sense. It takes at least five minutes for strychnine to take effect in most people, sometimes longer. Assuming he was fed the strychnine at dinner tonight—”