by Hy Conrad
“What do you think, Gifford?” said the captain playfully. “Are you a bad guy? Is that why she’s asking so many questions?”
“I’m not a bad guy.”
“Glad to hear it. Just be careful.” And just like that, he walked away. It had taken Sheffield just a minute to undo any progress I may have made.
“I wish I never pulled that stupid bell,” Gifford grumbled.
“Giff, you don’t mean that,” his dad scolded.
Gifford shrugged. “Maybe.”
The teenager shifted his eyes again. I chased them with my own, just fast enough to see them flit by a table of teenage girls also in the thirteen-year-old range, huddled together. They were gossiping as only teenagers can, with a pretty, sandy-haired girl in the middle of everything. She glanced toward Gifford, and her conspiratorial look told me all I needed to know.
“I want more Tater Tots.” Gifford pushed back his chair and sauntered over to the food carousel.
“Excuse me,” I told his father, pushing back my own chair. “I need Tater Tots, too.”
I caught up with Gifford in front of the potato trays, just a few yards from the trio of girls. “You weren’t on the crew deck last night,” I whispered in the boy’s left ear. “You didn’t pull anything.”
Gifford looked shocked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Aha. My suspicions were confirmed. People say “I don’t know what you’re talking about” only when they know damn well what you’re talking about. “You were with a girl, weren’t you? What’s her name?”
The thirteen-year-old gasped and abandoned his empty tray on the buffet line. I watched as he headed straight out the door, onto the deck.
“Have you seen any wrapped cookies? Oatmeal is preferable. The machine-made kind. Chocolate chip is okay, although I find the randomness of the chips unsettling. When will the cookie-making industry learn?” It was Monk, on his eighth or ninth time around the buffet carousel, catching up to me. So far he had snagged one bottle of water, a wrapped pack of saltines, and a hard-boiled egg. “Maybe I’ll go around once more and see if they have any.”
“You do that. Good luck. Meanwhile, I’ll just mull over my conversation with young Gifford, the bell ringer.”
I waited in the same place on the food carousel until Monk made one more complete circle, searching for his precious wrapped cookies.
“What did you talk about?” he asked, picking up the conversation right where we’d left off.
“I reminded Gifford that he didn’t pull the alarm.”
Monk was puzzled. Human motivations often puzzled him, especially in young people. “Why would he lie about that?”
“Because it makes him a hero. And it stopped his dad from bugging him about where he’d really been.”
“You mean with a girl?” Monk asked, shuddering at the thought of anything even remotely hormonal.
“He was with a girl,” I confirmed. “Trust me. I know the signs.”
“What signs? Do you think Julie ever lied to you about boys?”
“Probably. I lied to my mother about boys.”
“I never lied to my mother. At all.”
What could I say? “Not everyone’s as well adjusted as you.”
Monk frowned. “So if this kid didn’t pull the alarm, who did? Why haven’t they come forward?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
“Right,” he agreed. “But first, I need to find a cookie.”
And he headed around the carousel one more time.
• • •
Today was a full day at sea, as we sailed down the Baja California coast to our Mexican port of call. With every passing hour, the Golden Sun swam its way into warmer waters. A Jamaican steel drum band played out by the pool and gave a sense of tropical climes, even if it did seem to be lost on the wrong side of the continent.
There was a seminar going on in the conference room, but I’d made up my mind not to feel guilty about missing a few meetings. A lot of attendees had started cutting class after the first two days and were just enjoying the slower pace and the nice weather. My excuse was that I didn’t want to split my focus. I didn’t want anything to keep me from figuring out—okay, helping Monk figure out—how Sheffield had done the impossible.
I hadn’t seen Monk since lunch, but he seemed to be adapting to shipboard life. In his own way. He kept alive by drinking his precious Fiji Water and eating packaged food during the day, plus enough bananas to give a monkey constipation. Yesterday evening, he’d joined me for dinner, but we’d both been understandably distracted, and I’m not sure if he ate anything or just rearranged his food into neat, non-touching piles.
As much as he wanted to spend the rest of the time in his cabin, he did have an assignment. Captain Sheffield knew this ship forward and backward and must have used some of this special knowledge to perform his little magic trick last night. I told Monk that he needed to learn the ship until he discovered the trick.
I was taking a few minutes on a chaise on the balcony level above the pool, feeling a little tropical despite the distractions. The steel band had just finished a set, and I was closing my eyes—in order to think better, I swear, not to take a nap.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute later when I was awakened by a piece of performance art going on in the open space below. I like to think of Monk’s spontaneous shenanigans as performance art. I find it helps me cope.
Someone was shouting: a shocked, outraged woman. That’s often how these performance pieces start. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You’ll thank me later,” came the familiar reply in the familiar voice.
I dragged myself to my feet, went to the railing, and looked down to the pool. There he was, my problem-child genius, standing out in his orange vest. Behind him a dozen plastic lounge chairs had been perfectly lined up an equal distance between pool and railing, exactly the same distance apart from one another. They might as well have been wearing a sign: MONK WAS HERE. In front of him was his biggest challenge: an immensely overweight woman in a gray one-piece swimsuit and an off-centered chair. She squirmed like a fish as Monk tried to drag her, lounge chair and all, to line up with the others.
“You have to be the same,” he ordered her. “Look at the others. They’re perfect.”
“Let me go,” the beached woman yelled back. “I moved my chair here to get sun.”
“No, no. That’s a common mistake,” said Monk. “You’ll feel better when you’re lined up with the other chairs. And your tan will be more even. It’s a scientific fact.”
“Who are you?” She shielded her eyes to get a better look. “I want to talk to your superior.”
“I don’t have a superior,” Monk said.
“That’s hard to believe.”
Monk was still trying to drag her into position. “I mean, I don’t work for the ship. I’m a consultant.” The metal legs screeched against the wooden deck, and the poor chair looked in danger of collapsing. “Are you aware how much you weigh? I’m no expert, but I’d say exactly two hundred and forty-seven pounds.” It was the textbook example of adding insult to potential catastrophic injury.
“No, I don’t.”
A few other passengers were starting to come to the woman’s rescue, crossing around the half-deserted pool. “Sir? Sir? Ma’am? Is everything all right?”
“No, it is not all right,” Monk and the woman said in near unison.
“I do not weigh two hundred and forty-seven pounds,” the woman felt obliged to add.
Just to make things more interesting, Monk’s old roommate Darby McGinnis had stumbled over from his regular post at the poolside bar to join the bevy of Good Samaritans. He had even put down his frothy white drink with the umbrella, that’s how annoyed he was.
“You again,” Darby barked. The wound on his left cheek was healing nicely, I was glad to see. “Is this jerk bothering you?”
“It’s not her so much. It’s her chair,” Monk
said. “Come on. Help me move it.”
From my perch, I could now see Teddy, the assistant cruise director, coming through a door on the run. He had obviously been alerted, probably by a cocktail waiter.
“Teddy,” Monk shouted. “Thank God. Maybe you can talk some sense into this woman.”
“Mr. Monk. Good to see you, sir. You make the jokes again, I see. He’s a very funny man,” he added for everyone else’s benefit. “Professional comedian.”
Teddy had introduced himself to us last night while Monk spent twenty minutes trying to pick the right table in the dining room. He was a sweet, patient Cuban immigrant who instinctively knew how to defuse that situation and get Monk seated. I later found out that he had spent three days on a raft on his way to Miami, dealing with sharks and dehydration and drowning. I judged Teddy almost qualified enough to deal with Adrian Monk.
I know I should have gone down and joined the performance. But I didn’t. I would have just gotten in the way. To be honest, I didn’t even stay until the end. I’d seen it before, performed all over the world with larger casts and more exciting sets—not that I have anything against theater on cruise ships. But the original San Francisco production is always better.
And Monk would be fine.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mr. Monk Gets to Work
The play was still in full swing when I decided to end my moment in the sun and go down to the crew quarters. If there was one place to ferret out the details about Mariah and the captain, this was it.
On my way through the lounge, I happened to pass by the ship’s overly pricey business center. For a second I thought of going in and shooting an e-mail to my daughter, Julie. But I didn’t want to worry her about yet another murder. And I didn’t want to say that everything was fine when it wasn’t.
I also toyed with the idea of contacting Lieutenant Devlin, just to see if she’d ever been in touch with Malcolm about the Shakespeare case. But I didn’t have to. Malcolm was right there, his tall, angular frame emerging from the cubicle closest to the door and coming out just as I was walking past.
“Did you answer Devlin’s e-mail?” I blurted out. Wow, look at me. I was becoming another Monk. No hellos. No niceties. Just spitting out whatever’s on my mind.
“Nice to see you, too, Miss Teeger,” he said with exaggerated Southern courtliness. “Are you having a pleasant day?”
“Sorry. It just popped out. Hello. Nice to see you.”
“Thanks. And since you asked, I did talk to the lieutenant. Everything’s fine.”
“Good. She was worried about their case against Ms. Braun.”
“All taken care of,” he assured me. “I made a few calls and got a few more names of possible forgers. But the murder case seems pretty strong without them.”
“Really? That’s great.” It was certainly a load off my mind.
Monk will often make brilliant deductions on very little evidence—a misspoken word; a button out of place. This has become more and more of a problem in the courts, especially with juries who watch too many CSI reruns. Now they all want a mound of DNA evidence, like neon lights pointing to the killer. Our easiest cases are the ones where someone is so overwhelmed by Monk’s brain power that he or she confesses. “Did Portia confess?” I asked.
“Afraid not,” said Malcolm. “But they have enough physical evidence to hold her to trial. That’s what Devlin said.”
“Good. One less thing to worry about.”
“Worry about?” His eyes creased at the corners, but in an attractive way. “What are you worried about? You mean the accident last night? That was terrible. You knew her, didn’t you?”
“A little,” I admitted. “Mariah had a few problems. But she was a wonderful girl. She didn’t deserve to die.”
“No one deserves to die. Well, maybe some people do, but …” The creases framing his eyes deepened. “Hold on. Are you saying there was something sketchy about her death?” Malcolm lowered his voice. “Is Monk looking into it?”
“We’re both looking into it.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply … But Monk’s the one bad guys have to worry about.”
“They can worry about me, too,” I said. Then I straightened my shoulders, stretched my spine to my full five feet, five inches, and strode off across the lobby. I wasn’t really offended, just a little disappointed. Malcolm Leeds was looking less and less like the soul mate of my dreams.
I was almost at the door to the crew quarters stairwell when the overhead lights flickered, just for a second. I didn’t think much about it until the walkie-talkies began to crackle. A pair of maintenance workers rushed past me, almost knocking me down, and I was sure I heard one say something about the pool deck.
Pool deck? What had Monk gotten into now? Had the lounging woman been injured? Was he being restrained in a straitjacket? I could have kicked myself for being so complacent about his performance piece. Damn. Leave him alone for a minute …
When I got back up to the pool, Monk was standing off to the side, an onlooker this time. He wasn’t dead or injured or surrounded by villagers with torches and pitchforks. “What happened?” I asked him.
“I got the woman to run away. Then I straightened her chair. It didn’t take long.”
“No. I mean, what happened over there?”
I was referring to the area by the poolside bar. Two passengers in swimsuits, both male, both in their twenties, were laid out on the deck. They were moving enough to set my mind at ease. Four crew members with emergency kits knelt over them, asking them questions and checking their vital signs.
“You didn’t have anything to do with that?” I phrased it as a question. “Please say no.”
“Electrical shock,” Monk explained. “After that woman stopped making such a fuss, people went back to the bar. I saw those two sit down and put their naked feet on the footrail, which is not very sanitary. Someone should tell them.”
“Forget the footrail, Adrian.”
“I don’t think we should. It was charged. I can’t tell from this distance, but I’m guessing the culprit was the outlet that feeds that row of drink blenders. They all stopped as soon as it happened.” He cocked his head and rolled his shoulders. “Do you think I should offer help?”
“I’m not sure that would be appreciated.”
Darby McGinnis walked by us with an empty glass, probably on his way to refill his piña colada. He looked our way. “Did you have anything to do with that?”
“No,” said Monk. “Why does everyone keep asking?”
“Because you usually do,” said Darby, who walked off and began his quest for a new favorite bar.
The first officer had also arrived on the scene by the pool. I remembered him from that day on the bridge. He was a small, slender wisp of a man—East Asian, I assumed—who always looked too small for his uniform. He’d been on his walkie-talkie, which he now reattached to his belt. He spoke to a young bartender, who suddenly turned and pointed directly at Monk. “He’s pointing at you,” Monk said.
“I wish.”
“Mr. Adrian Monk?” The first officer was halfway across the deck. “Can you come with me, please?”
“Why does everyone think it’s me? It’s not me.”
“The captain would like to see you, sir. In his quarters.”
• • •
The captain didn’t live below the waterline like the rest of the crew. His little suite was on the bridge deck, starboard side, which they tell me is a naval tradition for captains. It had a little living room with an office setup, plus a pantry off to the side. Behind a closed door was what I guessed to be a bedroom.
“You can’t blame Mr. Monk for what happened,” I said as soon as we’d been ushered in. “It was an accident.”
Months ago, I had switched from calling him Mr. Monk to calling him Adrian. Monk hates it. About once a week, he still asks me to go back to Mr. Monk, but I feel it’s important for full partners to be on a first-name basis with each other.
On this occasion, I made an exception. I thought a situation like this could use a little more formality.
The first officer didn’t leave, but took his position by the captain, who had remained seated at his desk. The officer whispered a lengthy monologue into the captain’s ear. Sheffield paused and smiled.
“This has nothing to do with whatever escapade you were up to with the loungers at the pool, Mr. Monk. It’s about vandalism, maybe even attempted murder.”
Murder? Another one? All right, he had our attention.
“Someone rigged a drink blender,” Monk guessed.
“That’s right,” said the first officer. His gold name tag described him as SOLOMON LAO. FIRST OFFICER. SINGAPORE. The man chose his words carefully. “The bartender left his post when you were having that disagreement with … well, with everyone. While he was gone, someone sneaked behind the bar and substituted the blender body with a new one. It had an extra wire that was attached to the footrail. When the bartender returned and someone ordered a piña colada …”
“The bartender was wearing rubber-soled shoes,” Monk guessed again.
“Correct,” said Solomon Lao. “He escaped injury. But the two gentlemen at the bar were barefoot. Luckily, they were young and healthy with good hearts. Otherwise, we could be dealing with two more deaths. The last thing this ship needs.”
Sheffield winced at the sentiment but didn’t object. “The Golden Sun is not part of a cruise line,” Sheffield explained. “It’s an older ship, not as popular or as easy to fill. We don’t have the luxury of letting something go wrong.”
“And things have gone wrong,” I said.
“Correct,” said the captain. “Ever since we left San Francisco. You’re already familiar with most of the events. There was the balcony railing incident. That affected five cabins. Luckily, only one injury occurred, Mr. Darby McGinnis. Thank you, by the way, for keeping that incident our little secret.”
“Your secret is our secret,” I said. Monk stood beside me, wriggling uncomfortably, his lips sealed.
“There was also the incident of the tender,” continued Sheffield. “A hole had been bored near a bottom seam. Luckily, our crew caught it early, since some of the guests couldn’t swim. Then there was the near electrocution at the bar. Anything I’m forgetting, Mr. Lao?”
