The Traces of Merrilee

by Herbert Brean

  “It could mean something like that, yes. Or ‘He had me killed.’”

  * * * *

  The first officer hurried out to report to the captain, even as the nurse and the doctor began wheeling Klára’s body out to wherever they store bodies on a ship. I was left alone, except for the pastry chef. He looked at me, shrugged, and went out slowly. Everyone seemed to have something to do.

  I had something to do too, and the mere thought of it chilled me.

  I went up to the little aft bar, which was virtually empty. I ordered a double cognac and I put it down fast, with malice aforethought. Sometimes malice aforethought makes a good chaser.

  I waited for it to hit. And settle. And act. Then I went out on deck.

  The last thing in the world I wanted was to be seen fooling around lifeboats, but I went to the one containing Jones’s body. At least my knots, learned years ago as a Boy Scout, had held; the tarpaulin was still intact.

  I stood in close to the cabin wall and looked up at the dark bridge. Anyone up there could look down and observe me—could be watching me right now. And I couldn’t see him at all. It was a chance I’d have to take.

  But I hesitated nervously for a moment, and looked around, and I saw the sea aft was oddly littered with clots of debris. Then I realized what it was. The kitchen crew was dumping garbage.

  Now or never.

  I walked to the lifeboat and fumbled the knots loose. Standing on tiptoe I looked into the boat. It was pitch dark.

  I lit a match; the wind instantly blew it out. That was bad, for that little gleam could easily have been noticed from the bridge. I put the paper of matches into the boat and under the tarpaulin before lighting the next match. The instant it ignited, I dropped it inside the boat.

  The match flared for only a second, but in that time I glimpsed Jones’s face, the lips drawn back from the teeth in an animal snarl. Rigor mortis.

  But anyway he was there, and he had not been discovered.

  I retied the knots with shaking fingers and retreated into the lee of the cabin wall, hoping fervently I had not been seen. Between this and what the cold, precise Widow’s-Peak Pennypacker could tell about me, I undoubtedly could be sent up for life, plus ten years.

  When I returned to the grand salon, I stood at the doorway and saw that another officer had joined our table. Tom was saying something, and they all laughed at it. They were having fun. I looked at the captain’s table. Merrilee was still there, glowing, and every officer’s head was turned toward her.

  She was having fun too.

  The thing for me to do was get to work, and the work that most needed doing right now was to search her suite. But this was not the night to risk being caught snooping in Merrilee Moore’s suite. So I went back to the table and said, “What’s new?” and sat down.

  Twit-Twit put her lips close to my ear. “What did that first officer want?”

  “The captain lost his bearings. He wanted me to straighten him out.”

  The other officer, eavesdropping, chuckled. Obviously he had not heard the news yet.

  But Twit-Twit looked at me, not suspiciously as I would have expected, but with a kind of sympathetic understanding, even though she knew nothing about what was going on.

  You’d almost think she was intuitive. Or psychic.

  Chapter 13

  Porthole

  I awoke early and slowly, gradually discovering that I was feeling a little less than well. I had succumbed last night, or, to be exact, about five hours before I awoke, to the various pressures afflicting me. To be more exact, I had worked my way much farther into the cognac. Now, at a little after 9 a.m., I was beginning to work my way out. It would take a while.

  There was a vague sound, or something that sounded like a sound. It repeated and now was a definite bang. Someone was prowling around the suite. I swung out of bed quietly, and Tom’s voice spoke in ominous tones.

  “Sorry. I’m one of those things that go bump in the night. Did I wake you?”

  “No. What are you up to?”

  “I don’t know. It must be that God-damn champagne.”

  “Personally, I blame the God-damn brandy.”

  “Why do women force men to drink against our wills?”

  I took a pull at the ice water direct out of the carafe.

  “What are you up to? As I seem to remember someone saying earlier. Myself, I guess.”

  “I don’t know. I’m either going to get dressed, or else I am going back to bed. Or maybe I’m going to have a little hair of the dog. Or maybe all three.”

  Memory came flooding back in waves, of yesterday and last night, and each wave was taller and more overwhelming than the last.

  “I’ll go along with you and take all three, doubled. Let’s go.”

  “The drink first?”

  “I’ll wait a while. You go ahead.”

  “Maybe I will.” He thumbed the cork out of the bottle still resting in the champagne bucket. “Still cold,” he said, poured, sipped, drank, sighed gratefully. “Damned good thing I don’t really like champagne.”

  “Damned good.”

  I went in and took a long shower.

  When I came out, it was a couple of glasses of champagne later. I felt better and so did Tom.

  He said, “You know what? I think I’ll put on some underwear. Just as a start. Just to see what it will feel like.”

  “Everything generally okay?”

  “More or less. Less, I guess.”

  “Two will get you five I feel worse than you do.”

  “Why should you? What right do you have?”

  “I won’t go into it now. Maybe at lunch.”

  And maybe I would. I’d done some thinking in the shower. “I’m going to shave.” I did, to the accompaniment of an occasional gurgle in the other room. No one hates champagne like Tom Dolan.

  When all the lather was scraped off and I hadn’t cut myself, I said, “I see myself again. In the mirror.” I suppose I was a little lightheaded. “I look the same.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Every day it’s the same face. I don’t change. It’s discouraging.”

  “Have some wine.”

  “No. Onion soup.”

  “That’s a great idea. A hell of a great idea. The French Line. God bless it. Onion soup for breakfast.”

  “Then get dressed.”

  “No. It’s not that great an idea. If you see the steward, order me some, to be brought in at 11 a.m.” He moved toward his cabin with the champagne bottle.

  “Where are you going?”

  “A man must have his rest.” He waved the bottle. “Back to bed.”

  Betsy’s voice called, “Tom, what are you doing?”

  Tom took one more long draught from the bottle and put it down outside their door. “Coming, mother. See you later, man.” He went in.

  I got dressed. I had a bug to find, and I had a little plan.

  * * * *

  When I knocked at the door of B-78 I did not get an immediate answer. I did not expect one. She had no maid now, and she undoubtedly was dead-tired, and she’d probably taken a sleeping pill as well. So I knocked again presently, and louder, and got no response.

  I knocked a third time.

  Was she there at all? She must be. Where could she, of all people, have gone at only ten minutes after ten?

  I walked out on deck and around to her windows and peered in. If someone saw me, I was a Peeping Tom, trying to look in on the most glamorous woman in the world as she lay in bed, presumably naked, since that was the widely advertised way she was supposed to sleep.

  But as nearly as I could see through a half-lowered Venetian blind, the bed had been turned down for sleeping, but no one was in it, and no one had been.

  I knocked on the window and, as I d
id, I scanned the light-beige carpet in the cabin for bloodstains, remembering the maid. There was no sign of struggle or disorder. I walked back through the corridor companionway and quietly tried the doorknob. It was locked. I began, just slightly, to worry. For I thought of the garbage-dumping earlier. She was concerned about people falling overboard. If she had seen something go over the side, or float away in the ship’s wake...

  Hell with that. She could not be that impulsive.

  But I began looking around the ship, looking in the public rooms to see if by any chance she had gotten up early and decided to have a massage in the health room (which was closed tight), or a swim in the pool (no; she had said she didn’t swim), or write some letters (the library was empty).

  But the only person I met was Dr. Cyclops, the man with the bad eye, who brushed past, and when I looked in the dining salon it was almost empty. Onion soup did not seem attractive. I was worried.

  But as I made the rounds of the decks, I kept an eye peeled for bloodstains. Klára had been struck down and bloodily beaten someplace. Where? It could be findable.

  I saw no bloodstains anywhere. As I walked past our own suite the big steak-lover, who roomed next to us and ate at Cotton-Hair Pennypacker’s table, was complaining again to our patient-looking steward.

  “What do you mean, no Westphalian?” he was demanding. “It is always on the menu.”

  “But the machina, m’sieu,” the steward said. His knuckles, held stiffly at his side, were white.

  “The what?”

  “The machina. Machine that slices. The kitchen cannot slice the ham.”

  “Why not?”

  “The machine is gone. They are—how you say?—search for it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You can’t lose a meat slicer. Anyway, they can slice it by hand.”

  I continued my tour of the ship. I did not see Merrilee.

  So I finally went back to her cabin. Maybe she had gone for a stroll on the deck, and I just happened to have missed her.

  But as I approached the door a maid came along, and then another, and they both looked at me.

  “Is Miss Moore up, do you happen to know?”

  They looked at each other and one of them said something in French which I did not understand.

  “I don’t know, m’sieu,” said the other. “She was not a few moments ago. I looked in, quietly.”

  “Her personal maid—she had an accident last night.”

  “We know about it, m’sieu.”

  The other one said something else in French, and looked alarmed saying it.

  On a sort of crazy impulse, I spoke peremptorily. “What did she say?”

  They looked at each other with dismay.

  “What did you say?” I repeated harshly.

  “She—she say, there was a fight. Between Mademoiselle Moore. And her maid. The dead woman.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last night. When Mademoiselle Moore dresses.”

  “What kind of a fight?”

  “That maid. She is an evil woman.”

  “She’s a dead woman.”

  “Oui. But Michele here say she argue Mademoiselle Moore to go back to United States. Right away. When land en Angleterre. And la mademoiselle refuse. So they argue. So that maid—her name—”

  “Klára.”

  “Une Hungarian. An evil woman. She argue hard with the mademoiselle. She shout, get mad and scream. Michele heard. She was doing the bathroom.”

  “Okay. Merci.”

  I pulled two dollar bills from my pocket. “When Mademoiselle Moore returns, tell her to call me on the telephone, please. Here is the number.” I scrawled the suite number on one of the bills and gave it to her. She looked pleased.

  I don’t know how I looked myself, but anxious is probably accurate.

  * * * *

  I went back to the suite and let myself in. I didn’t feel like breakfast.

  Tom’s bottle of champagne was still by the closed door to their stateroom, Twit-Twit’s door was not quite shut. I went to it and looked in. She was sound asleep, huddled under a mound of blankets in the bed, while cold sea air poured in the window. She looked like a tousle-haired ten-year-old.

  I closed the door softly.

  The phone rang and I leaped to it.

  “Hello? Mr. Deacon?” The voice had a familiar huskiness. “Where the hell have you been?”

  I heard a kind of hoarse giggle. Was she tight?

  “Guess where I am. Right now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Sam’s stateroom.”

  “Is that where you’ve been all this time?”

  “Never mind. Look. I’ve discovered something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Remember? We won’t talk on the phone. But it’s something heavy and it should be taken out of this stateroom. Now here’s what you should do.”

  The low husky voice had an urgency.

  “I’ll pass it to you out of the porthole. When you see it, you’ll realize why I’m being careful. Now do this. Right away. Walk along the outer deck, alongside Sam’s stateroom. That’s the main deck. It’s the fourth porthole on the starboard side—that’s the right side, right?”

  “Check.”

  “Wait until no one is in sight, then just reach in and take what I will give you. Put it under your coat and walk away. Then I’ll call you.”

  “You’re in the stateroom now?”

  “Yes. And I’d better not stay here much longer. Walk up to the porthole whistling a little, so I’ll know. Then reach in.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll have the porthole all unscrewed and open.”

  “Go ahead. Two minutes from now.”

  I moved fast, found my way down the several staircases to “A” deck and went out into the weather. The ship was plunging deeply, and the spray came sudden as a whip across your face.

  There was no one on the starboard side of “A” deck. That was fine. I located the fourth porthole and walked past it. It was open.

  I turned around, walked toward it, and began whistling. Still no one was coming, either way. So I continued whistling—“High Society,” which is basically a march—and thus I marched up to the porthole. I put my hand up to it. What had she found?

  Even as I reached in, everything fit together. Maybe it’s because I heard a low humming. But there flashed through my mind the memory of trying, years ago, to unscrew the big wing-nuts on a porthole. I thought of Merrilee’s pretty but slender fingers. I thought—

  My arm was in, hand open and waiting for her to put into it whatever she was going to give me.

  And I pulled my hand out as the humming sound suddenly rose. I glimpsed a whirling, shiny steel blade where my hand had been, saw it rise and move quickly across the porthole. And vanish.

  It was an electric meat slicer. It had almost cut off my right hand. That was why our stateroom neighbor, a little earlier, could not get his Westphalian.

  What do you do when something like that happens? Do you know? I can tell you. You get a little sick and scared and numb for a moment, and walk away fast.

  Then sanity and anger return, and you walk faster toward the son of a bitch who tried to maim you. At least, that is what I did. Suddenly I was ready to kill.

  At Sad Sam Jones’s cabin, I hit the door with my shoulder; it flew open. The meat sheer lay sidewise on the floor, the razor-like circular blade still spinning and detached from the heavy steel platen it usually stood on.

  But the room was empty. So, I discovered in a few strides, were the bath and closet.

  No Merrilee. No anyone.

  As I looked around, sanity returned, and I began to understand what they had tried to do. They hadn’t wanted to kill me; it wasn’t that important. They just wanted to
make me an object lesson to her. Me now. Her later. That was the object lesson.

  And where was she?

  I looked down at my right hand. It was still there. So were all the fingers. For that I could thank my slow, somewhat hung-over, reflexes.

  Near the slicing machine’s platen lay a small tube that could have been toothpaste. I picked it up. It was theatrical make-up—green grease paint. It was a familiar shade of green. I had seen it before, and I could see it again—on my severed hand.

  Suddenly I felt sick. I had to go into the bathroom, where I stood over the toilet without really up-chucking. I stood there, cold and shaken.

  This took a little while.

  Then I picked up the circular-blade part, yanked its cord out of the wall, and left without trying to conceal anything. I found my way to Widow’s-Peak Pennypacker’s cabin, put it down in front of the door, and left.

  On my way to our suite, I passed the guy with the mesh gloves. He apparently had just come out of his stateroom, for he looked sleepy and was smoothing his gloves on; and he looked at me without seeing me. He was walking fast. I wondered what language he spoke.

  In the suite, I took off my jacket and shirt, debated Tom’s wine bottle and decided against it, and Twit-Twit emerged from her room.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Out. A walk around the promenade deck.”

  I pulled her over to the bed, kicked off my loafers, lay down, settled her beside me, and said, “Shut up.”

  As I’ve said, Twit-Twit sometimes seems psychic. She just lay there, and I kept my arm around her and enjoyed the comfort of her warm, slender waist and of sensing that she knew how I felt without knowing why I felt that way. After a while we both dozed, or semi-dozed, but I didn’t really sleep. We didn’t do anything else, either.

  We understood something unspoken between us.

  Chapter 14

  The Note and the Cable

  Across the pool, one of the bundled-up college girls was playing a guitar. Another was beating a shining spoon in her bouillon cup, and the rest were clapping their hands and chanting something that sounded like a cross between folk music and a mazurka by Bartok. Everyone was sitting blanketed in deck chairs, smiling at them, and even enjoying the cold, sullen sky and wet North Atlantic air. And relaxing.