Death Sets Sail_A Mystery

by Dale E. Manolakas

  The passengers began to rumble in loud dissatisfaction.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Sean as I looked with my bird’s-eye view around the foyer.

  “There. Over there,” Sean whispered in my ear as he pointed to the gangplank entrance. “Scotland Yard.”

  “For Amy!” I cheered.

  “I’d bet my bottom dollar on it.” Sean dredged up a saying I hadn’t heard since my parents used it in my childhood.

  “Thank God.”

  We both watched. Elias and Mary were within an arm’s length of Amy, but had been frozen in place also.

  The two suited Scotland Yarders, followed by four blue uniformed Bobbies, pushed the passengers back into a sardine pack as they crossed.

  “They’re heading right for Amy,” I said. “Justice!”

  “My partner must have gotten through to someone,” Sean bragged.

  A woman from a few stairs up blurted out, “What’s going on? I see cops.”

  “We call them Bobbies, madam,” a man with a Cockney accent corrected her.

  “What is happening?” she replied.

  “I don’t know,” another woman chimed in.

  “Drugs?” a man guessed.

  There was a rumbling about a drug bust around us.

  Another man volunteered, “I heard some people got sick,”

  “Oh?”

  The rumblings of speculation did not stop. People buzzed about smuggling, drugs, bad food, or trouble with the crew. The passengers seemed to know what to suspect. They appeared to follow the news, which was rife with these shipboard problems. Despite every cruise line’s efforts at cover-ups of any and every shipboard mishap and crime, these things got out. It was fascinating that no one thought of terrorists. It was just not associated with cruises like these.

  “No one knows but us,” I whispered Sean.

  “They will.” Sean smiled and kept his sharp hawk-like eyes on Amy. “Look at her. Amy knows.”

  I watched from above, but afar, at the culmination of all our efforts. I thought of the hard fought proof we had found, my superb detective instincts, and my friends. I reveled at the vindication I would have against Mavis and Esther. I was proud. I was ready to rub all this in Mavis’s face if I ever saw her again, which I might make happen now, just to make a point. And get a little payback, being honest.

  “Look at Amy’s face,” I gloated. “She sees them . . . She sees the uniforms.”

  “Yep, she’s looking around for a place to run like they all do when they get caught. Predictable. That what criminals are . . . predictable.”

  “Heather’s oblivious.”

  “Yeah, she doesn’t know who her newfound friend really is.”

  “She will now.”

  I studied the panic written all over Amy’s delicate face, normally flawless and serene. I enjoyed the fear in her usually calm hazel and gold eyes as she searched wide-eyed for an escape; an escape from justice for the three murders now bearing down on her.

  Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Amy’s eyes met mine as she calculated the probability of an escape up back up the staircase. Her eyes suddenly blazed with hate. If she could have killed with them, she would have. I was afraid but I also felt invincible and out of reach.

  As pride and joy at our victory filled my heart, the corners of my lips moved up into a smile at this trapped animal. She would pay for her murders, no matter how justified in her mind. I would go to my neighborhood coffee place with a new story. My stories about solving the Valentine Theatre murders had gotten a bit worn. I would give myself three weeks’ grace to glory in this new headline murder case at my coffee place and my social events. Then back to writing in earnest for me.

  “She’s going down.” Sean interrupted my negotiations with myself.

  “Yes, she is.” I watched Amy—her head now swiveling around desperate for a getaway, her hair pin-wheeling radiantly. “We did it. All of us. And I for one am . . .”

  “Wait. What’s happening? What is . . .” Sean interrupted. “They are passing her by? Don’t they see her?”

  “Passing her by?” I parroted.

  We both watched the ribbon of suited Scotland Yard men and Bobbies move past Amy.

  “They see her,” I said. “That first detective is undressing her with his eyes.”

  “They are not here for her,” Sean whispered. “They’re here for the bodies.”

  “The bodies?”

  “Yes. To transport them,” Sean spit out. “God, damn it!”

  “You mean they’re just here to get the bodies?”

  “If they were here for murder, they wouldn’t have passed her by.”

  I saw the detectives and Bobbies disappear through a back hall.

  “We lost,” Sean said.

  Amy’s face calmed back to its flawless saucer-eyed charm. Her eyes looked up at me again. They again transformed to a deep calm pool of gold, but this time with a victorious glint. She flashed a dimpled smile at me and then turned gracefully back to Heather at the customs table. As the crowd flowed again, Amy’s charm returned and she chatted with Heather. Heather hadn’t noticed that Amy’s façade had ever faltered.

  “And Amy knows it.”

  “She’s free,” Sean mumbled. “My partner couldn’t pull it off.”

  Elias and Mary moved against the tide of passengers toward the stairs and us. The passengers sifted through the tables and the exit once again.

  We stepped down into the foyer from the last flight of stairs and joined Elias and Mary.

  “We’re done?” Elias asked.

  “Yes,” Sean was definite. “We’re done.”

  “No autopsies either?” Mary asked.

  “An autopsy is required if you don’t die in a hospital . . . It’ll be back in New York. The bodies will be older. I’ll push when I get there, but the department’s clearly made up its collective mind.”

  “I can’t believe it.” I said.

  “She beat us. It happens.” Sean put on his dry professional hat, but was embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

  We rehabilitated Sean’s ego and placated him as we moved toward the customs tables to disembark.

  “It’s my fault,” Elias said. “She got the evidence from my room.”

  “It’s no one’s fault,” Mary said.

  “We all write enough about desperate murderers that we should have known.” Elias added.

  “Hell, I’m NYPD . . . well, retired NYPD. I should have realized.”

  “Will it come to anything more?” I asked.

  “No,” Sean said. “Decomposed bodies. Failed NYPD clout. No hard evidence. Wessex’s corporate machine . . . Esther. It’s a bad combo.”

  “But at least it wasn’t one of us in those body bags.” Elias flashed a mustached smile. “Or you, Veronica.”

  Elias gave me a big Greek hug.

  I hugged him back.

  “We’ll see each other next cruise?” Mary asked. “I’ve never had more fun on this dumb awards thing. Oh dear, that sounds so terrible!”

  “Nah, Mary. I feel the same way,” Sean said.

  “And, in two years we’ll be presenting an award to Veronica.” Elias announced.

  I gulped.

  * * *

  After customs, I paused on the gangplank. I looked out to the dock and the morning gray—overcast and misting but not raining. It was British gray, deep and solid. It wasn’t like my Santa Monica misty mornings that always had the promise of sunshine behind them. I took a deep breath of the sea’s salted air.

  ⌘

  Epilogue

  Southampton

  At the port in Southampton, the body-bagged and decomposing remains of Mendel, Frederick, Helga, and Brent were taken off, escorted by England’s finest. Despite Sean’s urging and his NYPD clout, the forensic autopsy could not put the Humpty-Dumptied, compromised evidence back together again.

  Amy slipped off the ship with her new fast friend Heather—ignored except by our discouraged quartet. Amy was never det
ained, questioned, or arrested in England or in America for the murders of Otto, Mendel, or Frederick. Apparently, even the imperfect murder is easy to get away with in the over-peopled, over-worked Big Apple, especially when the perpetrator is sailing on the high seas—and when the power of corporations, money, and vested interests wills it so.

  As Anne disembarked she was greeted by her lady friends from Bath—outfitted in floral wear from hat to toe in celebratory homecoming. They were as stout as Anne was slight, and they embodied the fairy godmothers in Disney’s animated movie Sleeping Beauty. That year, Anne published Foxglove Afloat—a deadly family reunion Hawaiian cruise where a rival inheritor kills off the rich relatives with the ever-popular, poisonous Foxglove plant. Anne’s inspiration was obvious—her result mediocre. Were she in our quartet, it would have been so much more.

  Elias Vlisides and Sean O’Flarity left the Queen Anne and made a beeline for London and a pub lunch with good English ale. Elias’s muse came back with a vengeance in a mystery about yacht deaths in Greece. Sean added more books to his best-selling detective series—as if the prolific Helga had possessed his fingers.

  Jody, Agnes, and Herbert went on the British writers’ tour, sans me. Back home, they stayed in Mavis’s writing classes. I, of course, never crossed paths with the three stooges again. However, I did occasionally look for their publications. And, not surprisingly, there were none.

  Mary went straight to Heathrow Airport to return to her suburban Farmington Hills life, her four kids, and her slasher books. After farewells, she trotted away, bun bouncing at the nape of her neck and sensible shoes moving her ample body through the crowd. Her next book was stellar with its vicious slasher plying his trade on a Mississippi River cruise.

  Mavis left the Queen Anne trailing after Esther Nussbaum—good riddance to both of them. Esther remained a visible and popular president of the MWW for years. Mavis and her agent republished her old series as e-books. The effort bombed, except for a smattering of five-star reviews, clearly elicited from friends or students. Mavis never published again. Instead, she edited for a living and enticed new suckers into her classes by trading on fictitious friendships with fabricated stories about Otto, Mendel, Frederick, and Helga—the dead can’t protest. Obviously, no one will ever know if she resorted to ghostwriting gigs.

  * * *

  I took a bus into London and stayed for three days waiting for my flight home. My refund from cancelling the English writers’ tour was paltry, but well worth it to avoid Agnes, Jody, and Herbert. I found an economy hotel near the theatre district with no en suite bath. I spent my mornings at Starbucks in Leicester Square waiting for the discount theatre ticket stand to open. There, I eavesdropped on the candid exchanges of artists, business people, tourists, locals, and—yes—writers bemoaning their writers’ block. I was a voyeur into a Santa Monica-like coffee klatch transported to London. I lunched at Harrods in the crêperie and at the Harp Pub, saw several plays on the cheap, took in the National Portrait Museum, and attended choral evensong one night at the beautiful and famous St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It was a wonderful experience, free of my cruise mates and asserting my own persona and interests.

  * * *

  Back in America Otto’s, Mendel’s, Frederick’s, and Helga’s funerals were celebratory of their contributions to the writing world, not their actual lives, as is true of many artists. They rose in popularity commensurate with their well-publicized untimely deaths—all deemed natural or accidental. They, of course, were never to write again. But, as often happens, their royalties mounted in trust accounts for the people fighting over their estates. As usual, death turned a tidy profit.

  Brent Hawthorne’s funeral freed him of his millstone and brutalizer, but unfortunately for him, not the way he wanted. He and Helga were buried together forever in the side-by-side plots Helga had very efficiently bought. She had even pre-ordered headstones—hers monumental, his a pale shadow beside it.

  Otto Stein lived on after death. But his memory survived not in the crude, sexualized, credit-mongering manipulative reality that was truly his. Instead, as often happens to the dead, he lived on in a fictionalized, posthumous alternative reality. That manufactured reality was one of a mythical, sage, fatherly, and nurturing icon. His canonization materialized because of a void felt in the authorial world, a marketing need on the part of his writing program at Greenwich University, and Esther’s search for a tragic, noble figurehead for MWW’s own aggrandizement. With the increased membership dues from the publicity, Esther now claimed an annual salary—not that she needed it, of course.

  Upon Sean’s return to New York, he and his partner made a valiant effort to fine-tooth-comb all the forensics available. They found nothing. The district attorney also concluded that Amy’s revenge motive, even if true, would not fly with a jury because of the remoteness in time and the lack of any remaining physical evidence tying her to the deaths.

  * * *

  Amy’s small agency grew after the cruise, especially when she landed Niall Littlemill as a client. He turned out to be a prolific writer himself; indeed, he had held back two manuscripts in reserve just in case he won the MWW award. Amy published them back-to-back. His career soared and the money poured in for both Amy and him. He became popular amongst his peers, who were now the elite of the writing world. Amy was busier than she had ever been, and, after a few years, published her novel, revised from the draft on the thumbnail I had taken from her stateroom to include the thinly disguised murders of Otto, Mendel and Frederick. No one seemed to notice the similarity to the deaths of the men who had tormented her and had paid the ultimate price. Indeed, her novel was a bestseller. She became a double powerhouse in the mystery-writing world—agent and occasional writer. Her successes apparently rendered our cruise quartet of no further consequence to her. She either felt vindicated or satisfied—and certainly safe.

  Heather’s books combining mystery, murder and science fiction were original and sold well, but, as I had predicted, not as well as her science fiction. As I had observed, she was missing the je ne sais quoi that all elite mystery writers possessed. Heather kept her old agent, but she and Amy remained a duo—strikingly attractive, talented, and popular. Thanks to Heather’s husband and the partner he worked for, they each landed a movie deal—or at least, they sold the rights. It remained to be seen if Hollywood would back the options with money and produce them. But Heather’s husband rose in his law firm along with those deals. Heather continued to apply to the Poetry Society of America, but never got in—famous or not, her poems remained mediocre. To me, they were excellent. But then, I believed that poets, as a literary group, produced an inbred snobbery—and not necessarily good poems.

  * * *

  Once home, our crime-solving quartet kept in touch by e-mail, at first in frequent flurries and then intermittent bursts. I also appreciated my life much more after nearly losing it. Plus, I had learned a great deal from my new friends and worked hard to publish. And, even without another arrest under my belt, I shared my shipboard adventures at my Santa Monica coffee klatch. Admittedly, I feigned professionally intimacy with the celebrity dead, since, after all, who could challenge me?

  Even more exciting—my muse erupted from the shadows. I finished the theatre book and started a cruise ship blood-bath book that rained bodies nightly. Why not? Everyone else had used the murders on our cruise in new novels in some fashion, and cruise mysteries were good sellers. I planned to edit and finalize one of my books for the MWW contest, but I had almost two years to do that.

  I had learned that writing and editing product was only two-thirds of the work of a published author. The business of publishing and promoting was the other third. I took workshops on getting an agent and e-publishing. Mary offered me her agent but a polite email let me know he didn’t want to take on any new authors, or specifically me. I certainly forgot about Amy’s shipboard offer. E-publishing with Octopus Books looked better and better. But I balked when I learned its new program gave
books away for free if customers joined their ten-dollar-a-month Readers Club. It left thousands of Indie authors with a small piece of a communist-style pot-of-money—in other words, pennies! But, either way, I needed to get concrete authorial validation before the next awards cruise.

  At home, with the cruise murders and strategic name-dropping, I was even more popular at my coffee place, lunches, invitational speaking engagements, and writers’ conferences. I considered it promotion, but never let it interfere with the time I devoted to writing. I discovered I could promote myself at my usual coffee place with a whole other population of squatters to thrill with my exploits. Then, I discovered other nearby coffee places with yet other potential fans. I was having a great time name-dropping, mystery solving, and just generally being popular. After all, I had now solved the Valentine Theatre murders and investigated the MWW cruise murder single-handedly—well, almost.

  * * *

  Curtis and I never got together. I waited months for his call. In late fall, I called him at his office. It turned out that he was married—with grown children and even grandchildren. He was encrusted in a life he liked, but not enough to stop his dalliances—frequent dalliances I believed. I rationalized that I was special to him. I rejected the possibility that he knew I was vulnerable, susceptible, and perhaps naïve—an easy target. Although I was a liar of sorts also, Curtis lied to satisfy his own needs. I simply exaggerated to help myself set goals—I hurt no one. At least, that is what I have always told myself.

  I devoted my time to my new friends, my various promotional activities, and to finalizing a book to win an MWW award on the next cruise. Interestingly, it was scheduled again with Wessex, whose marketing team had somehow spun gold from our web of murders and deceit. Which made the MWW not only acceptable as a cruising organization, but actually a draw. Of course, I also drafted and redrafted a unique and witty acceptance speech—because I believed, inevitably, that I would need it. It was my destiny, after all.