The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  “Take another pill,” Hal suggested.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight. Close enough. I went into our cabin and did just that.

  If I’d had any worries about the Ocean Lounge being too busy for us to discuss anything there, they were dispelled as soon as we got there. There were only two other couples, and they were both on the other side of the room. The dance band had either taken a break or quit altogether.

  We sat down, and the waiter, who was unfamiliar to me, came over to take our order.

  “I for one,” Hal said, “would like some decent Scotch. I didn’t much care for that stuff the captain served.”

  Nigel and I both agreed. The waiter took our orders and went back to the bar.

  Nigel pulled a notebook out of his jacket pocket. “Let’s write down all our suspects and talk about each one. Maybe we can make some sense out of it that way.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s start with the captain.”

  “I think we can eliminate the captain,” Nigel said. “Now that Sarah knows about Leonie, he doesn’t have any reason to have killed Leonie or Mrs. Levine.”

  “Not so fast,” Hal said. “When Leonie and Mrs. Levine died, he still hadn’t told Sarah.”

  “He’s got a point,” I said. “He doesn’t have a motive now, but he did then. He had no idea how Sarah was going to take the news.”

  “That’s true,” Nigel said. “He didn’t know she had a secret of her own.”

  “People were going around spreading rumors about Leonie spending so much time in the captain’s cabin,” I said, “including Mrs. Levine. Everybody thought they were having an affair. It wasn’t much of a stretch to suspect the captain when Leonie’s death became common knowledge.”

  “Do you think he killed Mrs. Levine too?” Nigel asked me.

  “We can’t rule it out,” I said.

  “Right, then,” Nigel said, making a note. “The captain stays on the list. Who’s next?”

  “Let’s keep it in the family,” I suggested. “How about Keith?”

  “He’s the stereotypical angry young man,” Nigel said. “Young, angry, and entitled. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as a ship captain, and he has now flunked out of six of the fifteen maritime colleges in England and Scotland. So Captain Sloane forced him to take a job on the maintenance staff, starting from the bottom.”

  “Which he hates,” Hal said.

  “So he chafes under the discipline required for his job and resents the chief engineer and everybody else he works with,” Nigel continued. “According to Officer Grant, he frequently gets into fights with other personnel and openly flouts the rules. He’s a constant disciplinary problem. There’s not much Gerard can do about it either, and that makes him grumpy.”

  “Then he finds out that he has a half sister,” I said. “That’s got to be the last straw. He sees her as an interloper, someone with whom he has to share his parents’ love and attention—and possibly his inheritance.”

  “He obviously wasn’t thinking clearly,” Hal said, “or he wouldn’t be worried about his inheritance.”

  “The captain has confirmed that Keith attacked Leonie and knocked her down, causing her to hit her head and suffer a fatal brain injury,” Nigel said.

  “Unless he was lying about that,” Hal said.

  “I doubt that,” I said. “We have forensic evidence. The handprint on her cheek matched Keith’s fingerprints, and the tissue under her fingernails matched his DNA.”

  “That only proves that Leonie scratched his cheek and he slapped her cheek,” Hal said. “It doesn’t prove that it happened in the captain’s cabin, or that it happened that night.”

  “Has anyone interviewed Bong?” I asked. “He was there the whole time we were in the captain’s cabin tonight. He was probably there the whole time that night too. He probably saw the whole thing.”

  “Grant didn’t mention it,” Nigel said, “but I can’t imagine that he overlooked something so obvious. I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

  “Up until tonight, the captain’s been covering for his son,” Hal said. “He didn’t want anyone to know that Keith was ever in his cabin. Anybody else would have been either summarily fired or put in the brig. Is there a brig on cruise ships?”

  Nigel and I looked at each other and shrugged. We didn’t know.

  “There’s got to be some place to put people when they get violent,” pursued Hal. “He should put Chief Gerard there, don’t you think?”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “If Keith reacts like that to finding out he has a sister, how’s he going to react when he finds out that Captain Sloane isn’t really his father?”

  “Or that his boss, Chief Gerard, is,” Hal said.

  “Better yet,” I said, “how’s Gerard going to react when he finds out that his biggest problem in the maintenance department is his biological son?”

  “I daresay we’ll find that out tomorrow,” Nigel said. “Keith has to be charged with second-degree murder at the most, manslaughter at the least.”

  “That’s only true if the brain injury was the cause of death,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Hal demanded. “Of course her brain injury killed her. You said so yourself.”

  “I know,” I said. “I said her brain injury was severe enough to be the cause of death. But what if she wasn’t dead when she was put into the cooler? Suppose she was still alive when she was taken out of the cooler and strangled to finish her off?”

  “You didn’t find any evidence of that,” Hal argued.

  “No, we didn’t. Know why? Because her neck was crushed in the roof.”

  Hal stared at me, mouth open.

  “I say,” Nigel said. “You just might have something there, old girl. We’ve been struggling to figure out why the body was crushed like that. What better reason than to destroy evidence?”

  “So who took her out of the cooler?” Hal asked.

  “That’s what’s been bothering me,” I exclaimed. “The cooler! There was no blood in the cooler. It had obviously been recently cleaned. It absolutely reeked of disinfectant. Rob said it got thoroughly cleaned between cruises and that there hadn’t been a body in it during this cruise until Mrs. Levine.”

  “Why should there be blood in the cooler?” Hal asked. “Didn’t Rob say she’d stopped bleeding?”

  “Yes, he did, but if she regained consciousness and began yelling and struggling to get out of the cooler, don’t you think it would raise her blood pressure and start her bleeding again?”

  “Toni, old dear,” Nigel said, “what does that do to the theory that whoever killed Leonie and whoever crushed her in the roof were two different people?”

  “We’ve been struggling with that,” I said. “We know that whoever took Leonie out of the cooler and put her in the roof had less than ten minutes to do it, but we don’t know how they could be there so soon after Rob and Officer Lynch left the infirmary.”

  “We were going by what Rob said the time of death was,” Nigel said.

  “Exactly. We’ve been going by a lot of things Rob said. But we’ve already caught him in two lies. He lied about calling the captain to tell him Leonie died, and he lied about there not being a body in the cooler before Mrs. Levine. What else has he lied about?”

  “Toni, you can’t possibly suspect the doctor,” Hal protested. “You two have been best buds through this whole thing. Why, he even loaned Nigel his cell phone to call Scotland Yard with.”

  “Right, then, let’s discuss the doctor,” Nigel said, making another note. “What do we know about the doctor?”

  “He was engaged to Maggie Hodges in college,” I said. “She broke up with him just before graduation. He followed her career. He kept calling her. So she takes a cruise job to get away from him. But when he gets out of medical school, he takes a crui
se job to try to find her and finds out she’s having an affair with the captain—or at least that’s what he thinks. That’s what everybody was saying.”

  “He stalked her, you mean,” Hal said brutally. “He’s a stalker, just like Robbie. If he can’t have her, nobody can.”

  “But he’s not the one who’s responsible for her head injury,” Nigel said.

  “No, he’s not. But picture this: he gets summoned to the captain’s cabin in the wee hours of the morning when there’s nobody around, and what does he find? The girl he loved and swore that nobody could have but himself, lying unconscious and bleeding on the floor. What a golden opportunity! Once he gets her out of the captain’s cabin and into the infirmary, he can do whatever he wants to her.”

  “But he’s not alone,” Hal pointed out. “Lynch is there too.”

  “Right. When they get to the infirmary, he starts setting up to suture her head wound and discovers that she’s stopped bleeding. He does a cursory examination, tells Lynch that she’s dead, and Lynch helps him put her in the cooler. Then they leave together. That’s what Rob said. But suppose they didn’t? Maybe Lynch left and Rob stayed to clean up—and what should he hear but a lot of banging and yelling coming from the cooler.” I waxed eloquent, gesticulating with my hands. “What to do, what to do? Should he pretend he doesn’t hear anything and just leave her there? How long will it take her to die? What if she’s still alive when patients start showing up? He can’t take the chance. He opens the cooler and strangles her. Then he realizes that he’s left marks on her. So now he’s got to do something about that.”

  Hal applauded. “Quite a performance, sweetie. The theater’s loss is our gain.”

  I made a mock bow. “Thank you. Thank you very much. And here’s another thing. If he did all that, it would explain how he could be so blasé during the discovery of the body and the autopsy. He’d be expecting it.”

  “That’s all very well,” Nigel pointed out, “but you’re forgetting something. He couldn’t get her up to the observation deck and into the roof without help. Who helped him?”

  “Maybe Lynch didn’t leave,” Hal suggested. “Maybe he helped.”

  “All right, let’s talk about Lynch,” Nigel said. “What do we know about him?”

  “The only thing I thought was weird was that he showed up in the middle of the night and I wondered if he’d been sent to steal my cell phone,” I said. “But Rob told me that Lynch started dating Maggie after college. She could have followed him to become a shipboard entertainer. Maybe they continued their relationship on board ship and he thought she was throwing him over for the captain because she spent so much time in the captain’s cabin. And …” I paused for effect. “He can open and close the roof.”

  “I seem to recall that the two of you had a rather lively discussion when he showed us to the captain’s cabin after we looked at the videotapes,” Nigel said. “What was that all about?”

  “I took the opportunity to ask him about his relationship with Leonie,” I said, “and I suggested that he must have been quite upset that she was spending so much time in the captain’s cabin.”

  Hal put a hand over his eyes. “Toni,” he said sotto voce, “tell me you didn’t.”

  “But I did,” I asserted. “He told me it was none of my business.”

  “Good for him,” Hal muttered.

  “Has anyone interviewed Lynch?” Nigel asked. “Because I haven’t.”

  “Maybe Officer Grant did,” I suggested. “You could ask him tomorrow.”

  “What about the ropes?” Nigel asked. “Whoever helped him had to be handy with ropes. We know it was all done with ropes because we saw it on videotape.”

  “Meacham?” Hal speculated.

  “Maybe there isn’t any Meacham,” I suggested. “Maybe he’s a figment of somebody’s very active imagination.”

  “Oh, come on,” Hal scoffed. “Officer Grant told Joe to have Meacham come to security to relieve him. Would he do that if Meacham was a figment?”

  “He was supposed to relieve Joe so that Joe could concentrate on the security tapes from that night and morning. Joe was supposed to e-mail whatever he found to Scotland Yard, and he did that.”

  “What’s your point, old girl?” asked Nigel.

  “If Meacham came to security and realized what Joe was doing, wouldn’t he have conked him on the head before he had a chance to e-mail anything?”

  “Yes,” said my stepfather, “that was rather the point, don’t you know.”

  “But we know he did e-mail because your friend Hardwick said so.”

  “That’s true, but …”

  “What would be the point of knocking Joe out after he’d sent the tapes?”

  Hal said, “Huh.”

  Nigel scratched his head. “You’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Suppose Joe found what he was looking for right away and e-mailed everything, and then went back to his duties without ever calling Meacham?”

  “Well, then, who did hit Joe over the head?” Hal asked.

  “Who else was present in security during Joe’s shift?”

  “Nobody,” Nigel said, “except for the doctor.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Seriously?” Hal asked. “You expect us to believe that the doctor killed Joe? What for?”

  “For the same reason we thought Meacham did,” I said. “He was afraid someone would recognize him in the videotapes.”

  “But why would he attack Joe after he e-mailed the tapes?” Nigel asked. “You now have the same problem as you did with Meacham.”

  “Because he didn’t know Joe had already e-mailed everything,” I said. “He could have gone to security right after he finished sewing me up and done it.”

  “How did he know about the videotapes in the first place?” asked Hal.

  “From me,” I said. “While he was stitching me up, we talked about it, and that’s when he told me the story of Bert Meacham. That’s why we were on that Meacham wild-goose chase in the first place.”

  “Wild-goose chase?” Nigel echoed.

  “I found the Legend of Bert Meacham on the Internet,” I said. “It was practically word-for-word what Rob told me. He could have read it there and told it to me to cast suspicion away from himself. Don’t you see? Meacham needn’t be involved at all. It could be anybody who’s handy with ropes.”

  “Like who?” Nigel threw up his hands in frustration. “And why has nobody seen Meacham since then?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he’s shacked up with his girlfriend in her cabin. And there must be countless crew members who are handy with ropes.”

  Nigel clutched his head in both hands. “So you think that the doctor killed both Leonie and Joe.”

  “Think about it,” I urged. “Whoever killed Joe ran away and left him there, lying on the floor. So who called the doctor?”

  “Whoever showed up to relieve Joe in the morning,” Hal suggested.

  “But nobody else was there when we showed up. Right? I didn’t see anybody else, did you, Nigel?”

  Nigel shook his head.

  “Joe certainly couldn’t have done it. So how did Rob find out about it?”

  Nigel sighed. “I see your point. He knew about it because he’d done it himself.”

  “It explains so many things if Rob did it,” I said. “Who disposed of the evidence? Who hit me over the head in the infirmary and stole my cell phone? Who stole my laptop? We’ve been frustrated because the murderer seemed to always be one step ahead of us. If it’s Rob, he knows everything we know.”

  “What about Mrs. Levine?” asked Hal. “Where does she fit into all this?”

  I shrugged again. “She could have been a patient. She could have talked about the murder and the rumors and who knows what else, and Rob could have decided she knew too much and killed her and p
ut her in the cooler.”

  “He would have needed help,” Hal said. “She wasn’t a small lady.”

  “He could have had any number of infirmary personnel help him,” I said. “He could have told them she’d keeled over in the exam room. He could even have had them help him do CPR on her first just to make it more believable.”

  Nigel drained his scotch and put the glass down decisively. “It hangs together nicely, I have to admit.”

  “Doesn’t it, though.”

  “There’s only one problem.”

  “What?”

  “We haven’t a particle of proof for any of it.”

  Thursday

  STILL AT SEA

  21

  But screw your courage to the sticking-place,

  And we’ll not fail.

  —Shakespeare, Macbeth

  WHEN WE WOKE up the next morning, the first thing we noticed was that the storm was still going on and hadn’t diminished in force at all. Rain still battered our veranda door, and getting to the bathroom in one piece was an adventure in itself.

  Packing, I reflected, was going to be problematic while being hurled from one side of the room to the other. So even though I’d already taken a seasick pill at midnight, I took another one, and I stashed yet another in my pocket for good measure.

  Sarah had invited Mum to have breakfast with her in the captain’s cabin, so Nigel, Hal, and I headed for the Lido restaurant. One quick foray into the pool area convinced us to eat inside the restaurant instead of out by the pool. If anything, it was darker, wetter and chillier than it had been the previous day.

  There were also more people in the restaurant than there had been the previous day, so we opted not to talk about the case for fear of being overheard. Instead we talked about our preparations for going ashore the next day. We were supposed to be off the ship by seven o’clock, and we had to have our suitcases packed and outside our cabin doors before we went to bed. We had to have our purchases and receipts ready for customs. Luckily, most of our purchases came well within the $800 limit, but I was pretty sure we’d have to pay duty on my topaz earrings. The blue diamond ring I’d bought in St. Thomas was exempt, because St. Thomas was an American territory.