by Hy Conrad
I sat up, turned on the reading light, and browsed the report’s headings: Balcony Railing. Passenger Tender. Ice Sculpture. Mariah Accident. Bar Electrocution. I was on my second pass when I focused on a list of names: Monk/McGinnis, Grace, Weingart, Winters, Sung. Next to each name was a cabin number: 457, 432, 444 … The cabins with the vandalized balconies, now all repaired.
It took me another few seconds to make the connection. Daniela Grace, Ruth Weingart, Sondra Winters, and Lynn Sung. The four best friends. And the only other cabins with the vandalized balconies.
The great thing about working for a decade with Monk is that you know a big clue when you see one, even if you don’t know what it means.
Under normal circumstances, I would have knocked on Monk’s door. But the sound of a vacuum cleaner told me he was still awake and might not be able to hear a civilized knock, so I used my key card, one of several that I’d been collecting over the past few days. Monk looked up from the perfect herringbone pattern of rug nap.
“Where did you get a vacuum cleaner?” I asked.
“You broke into my room at one a.m. to ask about vacuum cleaners?”
“No, you’re right. I have other questions. Sit down.”
“Just let me get in six more laps. Shouldn’t be more than a half hour.”
“No. Now.” I switched off the small Electrolux and made him sit on his bed. “Those four women, the ones you say look alike? All of their balconies were rigged to collapse, just like yours.”
I had expected some brilliant response, followed by “here’s what happened.” But he just stared blankly. So I told him about the secret memorial service just a few hours ago with the roses and the whiskey.
Monk still stared blankly, but this time he had a question. “What does Darby McGinnis do for a living besides drink?”
“Dr. McGinnis is a surgeon,” I said, recalling Darby’s statement at the business seminar. “If you can believe it. Cosmetic and reconstructive.”
Monk stood up and marched up and down his own herringbone pattern, making a total mess of it, touching the far window and the doorknob at each turn, as if he were doing laps. On his sixth lap, he turned the doorknob and raced out in the hallway. I followed.
By the time we got down to level four, Monk had taken a key card out of his pocket. By the time we got to cabin 457, he had it ready to insert.
Monk recoiled as soon as he opened the door. He almost retched in horror. “What a mess.”
It’s true. Darby’s cabin was a mess. But at least it was empty and no one was dead. Monk steeled his nerves and tiptoed, actually en pointe like a ballerina, to a stained blue blazer crumpled on top of a soiled section of carpet. “Tweezers,” he demanded of me. “Or tongs. Or industrial-strength gloves.”
“I get the point,” I said, and without any protection whatsoever, lifted the jacket. Underneath it was a spilled bottle of Jack Daniel’s, almost completely drained onto the floor. “Augh, it’s worse than I thought,” he said, and shot back out the door.
“Adrian, where are you going?”
I followed, of course—what else do I do?—down another flight to the Calypso level and out to the deserted deck. He was still way ahead when he rounded the last bend. “Stop,” I heard him shout a few seconds later. “It’s not too late. Don’t do it.”
I don’t know what I was expecting to see. This was the spot where Daniela and her friends had been performing their little ceremony, although at the moment I didn’t understand how that fit in.
There they were, all four of them, from early middle-aged to elderly, trying to heft the bloated, unconscious body of Darby McGinnis over the railing and into the churn of the Pacific.
“Put down the drunk,” Monk ordered them. They didn’t obey him as much as let Darby slip back onto the deck. He landed with a thud. “Good. Now step away from the drunk.”
“We can explain,” said Ruth Weingart, as though there could be some sort of innocent explanation.
“I know.” Then Monk proceeded to do the explaining for them. Meanwhile, I stood by, openmouthed. And Darby? He remained crumpled on the deck, snoring.
All four friends, Monk explained, had had cosmetic procedures back in San Francisco. That’s why Monk had seen the resemblance. Their sculpted eyes and noses and cheeks were all similar, all the product of a single surgical artist, Dr. Darby McGinnis.
But there had been a fifth, the friend Daniela had mentioned at the AA meeting, killed one horrible day exactly a year ago by their irresponsible, intoxicated doctor.
“We talked Samantha into it,” said Daniela, taking up where Monk left off. There was so much sorrow in her voice. “She was happy with the way she looked. But no, we knew better. We had this great surgeon who worked miracles. And who cared if he enjoyed a cocktail or two after work or on the weekends! We all knew it. It was like a joke.”
“Sam died the next day,” said Ruth. “A combination of infection and lidocaine and painkillers. She tried to call Dr. McGinnis, but he was in the bar at his golf club and didn’t pick up. The investigation blamed it on an accident, bad luck, a failure of communication. No charges were brought. But we knew better.”
“I gave up drinking that same day,” said Daniela. She looked at me. “By the way, Natalie, how is it going? I’ve been meaning to check in, but we’ve been distracted.”
“Doing fine,” I assured her. “Day by day.”
“Good.”
“So.” Monk picked up the narration. “You learned McGinnis was coming to this conference and thought it would be perfect.”
“It seemed like destiny,” said Ruth. “On the anniversary of her passing. According to the books I read, it’s easiest to kill someone and get away with it when they’re someplace out of their element.”
“Accidents happen on these boats,” Monk agreed. “Boats are deathtraps. Of course, you couldn’t unscrew just one railing. That would have been suspicious. So you unscrewed your own and hoped for the best. Your later stuff was even riskier, like the poolside bar.”
“He was there every afternoon, drinking piña coladas, both feet on the footrail.”
“Other people were there, too,” I reminded them.
“I know,” said Daniela. “We weren’t thinking straight.”
“You put innocent people at risk,” I said. “What if one of them had died instead?”
“We’re not experts at killing,” said Daniela, in the understatement of the day. “McGinnis almost drowned when we sabotaged the shore boat in Catalina. We were all on board, standing guard while Sondra tried to hold him under.”
“I grabbed onto him and pretended to panic,” said Sondra with pride. “Screaming and pulling him. You know us black folk. We can’t swim.”
“It might have worked, too,” said Ruth. “Except a guy from the crew pulled her off and dragged him back to the boat.”
“Didn’t he recognize you?” I asked. “Four of his old patients? You were stalking him all day today in San Marcos, right? Hanging outside that bar?”
“We thought that might be a problem,” said Ruth. “But he’s had so many patients. We were just paychecks.”
“That’s what gave us the idea for tonight,” said Daniela. “His desperate search for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.” She looked down at the twisted, snoring blob on the deck. “Don’t worry. We didn’t poison him.”
“Then you can still get out of it,” I said. “You’re not killers. You’re women in pain. And you proved you could do it. There’s no reason to ruin your lives and your husbands’. Does Darby know you drugged him?”
“We left the bottle gift wrapped outside his cabin door,” said Ruth. “A present from the captain.”
“Then he’ll never know—if we get Darby back to his cabin before he recovers. Adrian?” I looked at my partner. “Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t,” said Monk firmly. “It’s attempted murder. Plus destruction of property, aggravated assault, willful endangerment. You’re like a bunch of female pira
tes.”
“Adrian, please.”
“We were hired to solve the vandalism. It’s professional pride. Not to mention getting paid.”
“Adrian?”
“We’ll pay you to walk away and let us finish the job,” said Daniela. “Fifty thousand.” She said it like it was nothing.
“How much?” asked Monk, suddenly thinking it over.
“Fifty thousand.”
“And you promise to get rid of him?”
“Adrian!”
He turned to me and shrugged. “This isn’t a normal person, Natalie. It’s Darby McGinnis.”
It’s never a good sign when I’m the sole voice of reason. “Adrian, you can’t let them kill him.”
“Party pooper.” Monk sighed. The expelled air was mixed with a low groan and lasted about thirty seconds. “Okay, you’re right.” He turned to the women. “Sorry, girls. Natalie, get the captain.”
“No!” shouted Daniela. She seemed about ready to faint. Despite the snoring drunk at their feet, they all looked so helpless.
“Hold on,” I told Monk. “Maybe we can come to a compromise. Meet somewhere in the middle.”
“You mean arresting only two of them?” asked Monk. “That hardly seems fair.”
It took some more convincing, but I knew how Monk thought, and we eventually got it worked out. Darby would live. I would keep an eye on the news, just to make sure. But I trusted them now. This moment had been cathartic, and the impulse would pass.
“We won’t try again,” said Lynn Sung. Up until now she’d been the quiet one. “We just had to do something. We didn’t care about the repercussions.”
“Samantha wouldn’t want you to ruin your lives,” I suggested. And they agreed.
The hard part now would be getting Darby back to his cabin.
We tried several times, all six of us. But drunken flab is almost impossible to lift. And even if the man could be lifted and carried, there was no guarantee that we could get him there without being seen.
“How did you get him here in the first place,” I asked.
“He was still stumbling,” said Ruth. “All we had to do was guide him along. Obviously, things have changed.”
“Just leave him,” Monk suggested. “He’s woken up in worse places.”
And that’s what we wound up doing. It had been a long, emotional day for everyone. The temperature was well above freezing, almost balmy, and Darby’s bulk would keep him from sliding under the railing.
Mission accomplished.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Mr. Monk Files a Report
That same night, before Monk and I even knew we were about to solve the ship’s vandalism case, Lieutenant Amy Devlin had left the warmth of her rotisserie chicken and driven to a duplex apartment on Lexington Street in the Mission District, no doubt cursing me all the way.
Devlin was not subtle by nature. As a detective, she’d done some undercover work. But her hard-nose attitude was more attuned to throwing herself into a situation and getting it done, especially when it was late and she was hungry.
A more subtle detective might have knocked, politely introduced herself to Professor Gretchen Wilder, and made up some excuse to ask Gretchen’s old friend and houseguest, Portia Braun, what she’d been up to today. Instead, Devlin made her visit short and unsweet. The fact that the women were about to sit down to a great-smelling dinner probably didn’t help.
While Gretchen went back to set the table, Portia outlined her alibi. She had driven to Oakland that morning, she said, gone browsing at a few secondhand boutiques, driven back into the city for lunch, then out to Berkeley in the afternoon to catch a German-language film at an art house near the university. Her whole day. Alone in a crowd.
“You went back and forth across the bay twice that day?”
“Yes,” Portia said. “I was feeling sort of aimless. Driving helps me cope. Is there a law against that?”
“Not yet,” said Devlin. She thought about asking Portia to describe the plot of the movie, but Devlin had once seen a German art house film and knew there probably wasn’t much to describe.
On her way back to her car, Devlin stopped to peer inside Portia’s car, the one she’d been leasing during her California stay. Suctioned onto the windshield was a FasTrak pass, which gave the lieutenant an idea.
Back home, while chewing on her tough, warmed-up chicken, Devlin used her police ID to check the secure section of the Bay Area Toll Authority Web site. Portia’s story seemed to check out. According to her FasTrak, she had traveled across the Bay Bridge at 9:05 a.m., then again at 11:39 and 1:47, and finally back home at 5:57 p.m.
Early the next morning, Monk was standing over my shoulder, reading Devlin’s lengthy, poorly typed e-mail. No one else was in the business center at this time of day, so we felt free to speak.
“Did you really think she flew down to Mexico, killed Malcolm, and flew back?”
“It’s less than a two-hour flight,” said Monk. “And, given the fact that she was planning the theft of a six-million-dollar-book, the woman probably has a fake passport.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why would she fly all that way to run down the guy who helped get her arrested? If she’s that vindictive, she should have run you down.” But I guess I already knew the answer. “You think they were in on it together, don’t you?”
Monk shrugged, his way of saying yes. “It’s not unreasonable they would have met, two rare book experts in a city the size of San Francisco. She would have told him about the Shakespeare folio, and it would have been tempting. But their plan went wrong. Melrose died and Mr. Leeds was brought in by the police to authenticate the volume.”
“That’s just a theory,” I said. I couldn’t help feeling defensive.
“But it explains why Malcolm Leeds never responded to Devlin’s calls, and why he took his toothbrush, and why someone in a rental car would run him down in Mexico.”
“Except she didn’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say it was a perfect theory,” said Monk, and led the way out of the business center.
Today would be a day and night at sea, as the Golden Sun raced north toward Pier 35 in San Francisco. The salt air was already a little cooler, or so it seemed.
I had scheduled a meeting late in the morning with Captain Sheffield and his wife in their quarters on the navigation deck. We had only a few minutes to spare, so I avoided taking Monk through all the distractions of the pool area. Instead, we cut through the lobby to the main staircase, where we happened to see Darby McGinnis slumped at the breakfast bar, nursing a cup of coffee. My eyes met his for just a second. I felt so guilty—and curious—about last night that I had to stop and say hello.
“Natalie. Monk,” he murmured. You could see from the way he sat that the man was in pain. His face seemed to have a few new bruises.
“Darby,” I said. “What happened? You look …”
“Terrible,” Monk said, completing my thought. “Like you had an alcoholic blackout and woke up on the deck this morning without remembering how you got there or anything. Am I right?”
“Pretty much,” said Darby in a feeble chuckle.
“Good,” I said. “I mean, it’s good that nothing worse happened. I mean, you could have fallen over a railing.” Shut up, Natalie! “But you didn’t.”
“It’s the second time this week,” Darby moaned. “First time, I felt like I was suffocating. This time, I felt all these hands… . I’m thinking it may be time to do something. About my drinking.”
That was good to hear. Finally. “They have meetings on the ship,” I said, pointing across to the meeting room by the T-shirt boutique. “Friends of Bill W. Every day at four. I’m sure they’d be glad to talk to you.”
“You mean AA?” He laughed. “Jeez, I’m not desperate. Just thought maybe I’d stick to beer for a while.”
• • •
I had spent an hour that morning writing up a short, evasive report. I knew it would be a thankless
job. But writing useless reports is one of the obligations of running a business.
Monk and I sat across from Dennis and Sylvia Sheffield at the coffee table in their little suite. Each was reading a printed copy. Neither looked pleased.
“You’re saying you solved the case,” said the captain, indicating the lead bullet point on page one. “And yet”—he flipped to page two—“you don’t state what happened or who was behind the various acts. People could have died.”
“People did die,” Sylvia pointed out.
“Yes,” I allowed. “The good news is that neither death had anything to do with the vandalism.” That’s one of the things I learned from Business Management for Idiots, page forty-seven. Always mention the good news, even when there isn’t any. “The Mexican police ruled Mr. Leeds’ death an accident. Miss Linkletter’s death looks like an accident, too.”
“It looks like one,” interjected Monk.
“You’re obviously protecting someone,” Sheffield said. “Who?”
I ignored the question. “Would you prosecute the vandals if we told you their names?”
“Are they employees?” asked Sylvia.
“No,” I said.
Sylvia frowned. “Then no. Probably not. Publicity in this sort of thing is never good.”
“And we can assure you that those events were unique to this cruise. The motive didn’t involve the Golden Sun company, and it won’t be repeated on future trips.”
“Then why won’t you tell us?” asked Sylvia. “We said we’re not going to prosecute.”
“Was it teenage kids?” asked the captain. “A disgruntled employee? No, you said it wasn’t an employee.”
“Sorry,” I said.
Monk and I had thought it over. We agreed that a killer isn’t the best person to trust with anyone’s secret, especially the secret of four rich, vulnerable women who’d made a horrible mistake.
“So we’re exactly where we were before,” said Sheffield. “If we hadn’t hired you, the results would be the same. In fact, there’s no proof you did any investigating at all.”
