Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  I ran into Ollie and Lettie on my way back to the stairs and they suggested a drink in the lounge on the Poseidon Deck. Up two more levels. It was a large, well-upholstered room with U-shaped sofas and lots of throw pillows. Lettie and I sat facing the windows on one arm of a U and Ollie, opposite us, occupied a section of sofa normally sufficient for two people.

  “You’ve changed clothes, Ollie,” I said.

  “I’ve been handling fish all afternoon. Lettie made me take a shower.”

  “I asked him if he needed a sponge for his bath. We have plenty.” Lettie stuck her foot around the coffee table and gave Ollie’s tent-pole leg a light kick.

  Ollie cleared his throat and paused a moment. “Lettie tells me the man you found in the alley was our ship’s photographer.”

  “It was,” Lettie said.

  “I don’t think I’d have recognized him,” he said. “Who looks at a photographer when he’s taking your picture? He’s always got that light shining straight in your eyes.”

  “But you can count on Lettie to recognize anyone she’s ever seen before.”

  “Of course I recognized him. We’d just passed him on the dock. He had a cute sort of round face and he was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt.” Lettie paused and studied her hands for a moment. “The shirt wasn’t blue and white when I saw him later. It was red.” Her voice faltered. “So much blood. You wouldn’t think a person could have so much blood in him.”

  “Did you see a knife?” I asked. We hadn’t discussed this at all on our walk back to the ship. We hadn’t waited for a bus to tote us across the hill, and the three of us had made the whole trek in silence.

  “No.”

  “Did you see any cuts on his arms? I mean, if there were cuts, it would indicate he’d fought his attacker.”

  “Oh yes. His arms were all cut up. His chest, his arms, his neck. All cut up.”

  “It must have been a battle.”

  “A lop-sided battle,” said Ollie. “Apparently only one of them had a weapon.”

  “I sure hope they find the weapon. The knife or whatever it was.”

  We talked about it at length, but all we knew was based on the one brief look Lettie had, and that wasn’t nearly enough. The waiter brought our drinks. The lounge was starting to fill up as people returned to the ship. We were already a half-hour past the time we were supposed to have left the dock. A man came over and asked us if he could take the empty chair at the open end of our seating nook, but before he could take it, a hand grabbed his shoulder.

  Marco stood behind him. “Sorry, but I need this chair,” he said. The man bowed politely and left.

  “What a day, eh?” Marco pushed the chair close to my end of the sofa and sat. He smelled of sweat. “Li mortacci . . .” He squinted, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Tell us,” I said, and the three of us stared at him.

  “His name was Nikos Papadakos and he was from Crete. His family, his wife and children, still live in Crete. He had worked on this ship for two seasons. Everyone liked him.”

  “Not everyone,” Lettie muttered.

  Marco gave Lettie a sidelong glance. “Everyone they’ve talked to so far. A lot of people from the ship were down in the area near the waterfront when it happened. The police grabbed everyone they could find and talked to them. At first, their chief wanted to hold up the ship’s leaving until they could sort everything out, but the ship security and the FBI men came down and talked to him. They pointed out that the people on the ship are as good as in jail when it comes to escaping.”

  “Absolutely,” Ollie said. “Much easier to escape from an island with a dozen marinas than from a ship.”

  “Have they found a weapon? What was it? A knife?” I asked.

  “Almost certainly a knife, and no, they have not found it.”

  “Do you think our photographer had a weapon, too? Lettie says he was all cut up.”

  “It is hard to say. He has lots of defensive wounds all over, but if Papadakos had a weapon, the killer must have taken it with him.”

  Ollie leaned back and threw one arm across a cushion. “Are they letting you work the investigation with them?”

  “No, no, no. I am just a passenger. I am not part of the investigation. They let me help them in the alley because I made myself useful. I am good at crowd control.” Marco grinned a little. “All I have told you, I learned by listening to them. When they were talking to people from the ship, they were mostly using English. When they talked to each other in Greek, I did not understand everything they said.”

  “And nobody heard anything?” I said. “I find it hard to believe a vicious attack like that could take place in a little alley, so many people within earshot, and nobody heard a thing!”

  “I agree. I think when they have a chance to talk to everyone, they will find someone who does remember something.”

  I looked at my watch. “Will you excuse me? I want to catch Luc Girard’s talk in the library and it’s almost time. Will I see you at dinner?” I touched Marco’s shoulder as I stood to leave.

  He jumped up, knocking his own chair over, and bowed slightly. “I will take a shower and change clothes. Shall we meet here and go down to dinner together?”

  Yes. Please take a shower, Marco, is what I thought. “About eight,” is what I said.

  Chapter Eight

  Luc Girard shifted a tall, white-ground jug from the corner of the reading table to a safer spot near the center. The first to arrive for the lecture, I screwed up my courage and introduced myself to the man I had admired on video. He stepped around the table and shook my hand.

  “I’m thrilled to meet you in person, Dr. Girard,” I said, hating the cloying formality in my voice. I told myself to lighten up. “I teach ancient history at a junior college in America and I have discussed your work with my students. You were working, I believe, on an excavation in Crete?”

  “Yes. With Dieter Matt. But no more.” He said it with a finality that told me Dr. Matt and he had had a falling-out. Luc Girard’s face puzzled me. Caramel-colored eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a delicate mouth, shaggy hair, and a sparse goatee. He seemed, at once, both formidable and vulnerable.

  I turned my attention to the items on the table. “I see you have both red-figure and black-figure pottery. Which is older?”

  Girard walked back around the table and picked up a brick-red vase with black figures around its middle. “This is older. About 450 b.c.” He pointed to a black vase with red figures. “The idea for reversing the process came later, and the white-ground came still later. He picked up the jug—he called it a lekythos—and showed me the museum identity marks on its base. The red-figure and black-figure vases were reproductions, he told me. He disappeared under the table and popped back up holding my favorite of all prehistoric works, the marble Cycladic figure known as the harp player. A work of art that would hold a place of honor in any exhibition of modern sculpture, but carved more than 4,000 years ago. Clean lines, graceful curves, a mastery of space.

  I gasped. “The Harp Player! Surely you’re not . . .” Then I realized how silly that was. “It’s not the original, is it?”

  “Of course not. The original is in Athens. I like to show people reproductions of the things I talk about, when the genuine article isn’t available. You dig?” He had a French accent but he seemed at ease with English.

  “What about the Cycladic fertility figure in the display case by the stairs?”

  “It is genuine.”

  “How can the ship risk putting such a valuable item on display? In fact, how does the cruise line acquire these things to begin with?”

  Girard gave me a penetrating look and paused a second longer than necessary before answering. “It is curious, isn’t it?” He lowered his head and continued staring at me over the tops of his glasses. “You dig?”

  People were filing in now and rearranging chairs to suit themselves. I gave Dr. Girard one more look, aching to
know what he was trying to tell me with his eyes. He turned back to his artifacts and I slipped outside, assuming it would be a few minutes before the lecture started. Did Girard realize how funny that little expression of his, “you dig?” sounded coming from an archaeologist?

  On the promenade outside the library door, I found Sophie Antonakos gazing out to sea with one espadrilled foot on the bottom rail. Déjà vu. Hadn’t I seen her at this same spot about three o’clock this morning? She held her chestnut hair back with one hand. A mass of corkscrew curls blew in the wind. I slipped up beside her.

  “Are you waiting for the lecture, too?” I asked.

  She jumped as if I had surprised her. “Oh! No, I was trying to get up the nerve to apologize. I bumped into Dr. Girard a while ago. It was an accident, but he was so nicely picking up my brush for me when I ruined it all by cracking my head against his.”

  “I’m sure he knew it was an accident.” I saw no need to tell her I’d witnessed the event.

  “You don’t think I should apologize?” Sophie glanced anxiously toward the library door, and I got the feeling she was looking for an excuse to talk to Luc Girard.

  “Are you free for a few minutes? Why don’t we go to the lecture together? If you can’t stay for the whole thing, you can duck out anytime you want.”

  “Oh.” Sophie bit her lower lip. “I am interested in archaeology, actually. Not that I know very much, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I haven’t been to college,” she said.

  Before Sophie could talk herself into more abject unworthiness, I took her by the elbow and ushered her through the library door. By this time, most of the seats were taken, but I spotted a step stool near the wall-mounted atlas stand and led Sophie to it. We managed to rest one-and-a-half butt cheeks each on the stool.

  Luc Girard began. “The islands we are now in are called the Cyclades, and it is here, in prehistoric times, that some of the finest art the world has yet seen was born.” His lecture had been billed as a comparison of Cycladic and Minoan civilizations, but after a few minutes in which he told us, rather than two separate civilizations, we should think of them as one civilization that evolved into the other, he detoured into a discussion of how to tell genuine antiquities from reproductions.

  I glanced at Sophie several times and what I saw on her face was pure adoration. Almost rapture. Was she that keen on archaeology or did she have a crush on the man? Or both? Luc Girard was a fine-looking man and, although I’m bad at estimating people’s ages, I’d have guessed he was a few years older than Sophie. Late thirties, probably.

  “Now that I’ve shown you how to tell the real from the fake, make certain, when you buy, you always buy the fake.”

  The audience tittered.

  “Because it’s illegal to take real antiquities out of the country,” he added. He picked up a reproduction red-figure vase, handed it to the woman nearest him, and told her to pass it around. He started a couple of other items around the room, then the white-ground lekythos. This made me nervous because it was the real McCoy. As they passed it along, everyone turned it upside down and looked at the black numbers, which pegged it as an authentic museum piece. The lekythos made the round of the room to the last man who sat near the door and about eight feet away from Sophie and me. He held it out toward Sophie, but the gap made it necessary for her to get up and lean over toward him. He passed it to her.

  She dropped it.

  If it had fallen straight to the carpet it might not have broken, but it fell onto a brass doorstop that had been pushed aside when they closed the door. Sophie cried out like a wounded kitten and ran from the room. By the time I got out to the deck, she was nowhere to be found. I returned to the library, not knowing what to say but knowing I had to say something. Girard was on his knees, slowly placing each piece of the broken lekythos on the seat of a nearby chair.

  “Is there anything we can do to help, Dr. Girard?” an elderly man asked.

  “There’s a tray behind the table,” he said softly. “Bring it to me.”

  Someone handed him the tray and the rest filed quietly out. It was just him and me now. He moved the broken shards reverently from the chair seat to the tray. He lowered his head to the carpet and looked sideways, licked one finger to pick up a tiny sliver.

  “I’m so very sorry this has happened, Dr. Girard. Sophie, the poor girl, I know she’s devastated. She admires you and your work so much.”

  “Ask Sophie to see me at her earliest convenience.”

  I promised I would.

  * * * * *

  Kathryn Gaskill opened her door, took my arm with her small, cold hand, and pulled me into her room. She obviously hadn’t allowed the staff in to clean because her bed was still unmade and a couple of bathroom towels lay on the floor. I stepped over them and seated myself at her dressing table. Now wearing a green wrap-around skirt and yellow blouse, she stood in the center of the room, her hands over her mouth, staring at the wall as if she had forgotten where she was and what she was doing.

  I waited a full minute in silence before she turned and acknowledged my presence. “I came down about an hour ago, Kathryn, but you weren’t here.”

  She said nothing.

  “Any news?” I asked.

  “I was up on the . . . other floor. In the security office. I was talking to the FBI men and those other men.” Kathryn was one question behind me.

  “Any news?”

  “No sign of George. They searched every inch of the ship while you were ashore and they’ve still got two helicopters and some little boats out looking for him. They said they’ll keep it up until dark, but it’s useless. I told them George is a poor swimmer. He can’t tread water for more than a few minutes, so even if he was conscious when he hit the water he wouldn’t have lasted long.”

  “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to go to dinner with us? Or I could have them bring dinner to you.” I flashed on a picture of the five of us and one empty chair at the table, like last night but minus George. Not such a good idea, perhaps.

  “I can have them bring meals to me anytime I want.” Kathryn glanced at the phone. “But I think I would like to go with you. I can’t stay in here forever.” She walked past me and into the bathroom. I heard water running. When she came out, holding a wet cloth to her face, she said, “They think Ollie Osgood did it. They think he killed George for the poker winnings he left the casino with.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He and Lettie are good friends of yours. Of course, you never want to think that someone you know . . .”

  “Don’t even try that, Kathryn.” I felt my hackles rising. “Ollie Osgood is a successful building contractor. He makes more than five thousand dollars in a week.” As I said it, I realized my numbers were probably way off on the high side. I had no idea how much Ollie made, but I felt no inclination to soften the impact by making a correction. “You don’t kill somebody for less than two weeks’ pay!”

  “He was the last person to see George alive.”

  “There’s no way to know who was last. What about the others who were in the casino when George picked up his winnings? Who’s to say they didn’t follow him out and wait until Ollie went to his own room?”

  “Everyone who was in the casino at the time has been questioned.” Kathryn gave me a steady stare. “They gave each other alibis. They swore nobody left for at least an hour after George and Ollie left.”

  I counted to ten and changed the subject. “Is this the first cruise for you and George? I mean, why did you choose the Greek Isles? There are lots of cruises closer to home.”

  “That’s exactly why we chose the Greek Isles. We wanted to go as far from home as possible.” She folded her arms across her stomach and sat on the edge of the bed that would have been George’s, the one that hadn’t been slept in. “Poor George has had such a rough time since he lost his principalship. I told you about his troubles, didn’t I?”

&
nbsp; “You mentioned it. Tell me.” I kicked off my sandals and moved to the sofa, tucking my feet behind one cushion.

  “George was a great history teacher. Students, faculty, administrators, everybody, respected and admired him. Kids used to come to him with their problems. Other faculty members asked his advice. They talked him into taking over as principal when the former one died and that’s when he found out about all the dirt, the petty squabbles, the politics, which had been under the surface all along, but which he’d never been aware of before. Certain factions on the faculty were trying to get him fired and others would come to him with all sorts of rumors and demand he take action. Well, you can’t fire somebody because somebody else says she’s getting too friendly with her students, can you?”

  “Of course not. And I know what you’re talking about, Kathryn. My own college has those factions, those cliques, but I’ve learned to stay out of school politics.”

  Kathryn gave me an impatient look and went on. “There was a certain young lady a teacher sent to George with a note charging her with cheating. The teacher had solid proof, so George suspended the girl. Her parents protested, because she was a graduating senior and a suspension would, they claimed, jeopardize her chances of getting into the college of her choice. I say ‘they claimed’ because her whole high school record made it unlikely she’d get into any decent school.

  “She told her parents George had come on to her. Kissed her. Fondled her. Told her he knew she wasn’t really cheating but if she ratted on him, he’d suspend her. Totally ridiculous, of course, but parents will believe anything their little darlings tell them.” Kathryn’s upper lip curled on the word darlings. “She said she told George she would indeed tell all, and that’s why he suspended her.

  “Somehow, the thing snowballed. George refused to back down on the suspension, and the girl embellished her story until it was, ‘He raped me.’ She got some of her friends to say George was always leering at them during cheerleading practice, that he gave unlimited hall passes to girls who ‘cooperated’ with him. And, of course, there were certain faculty members who were delighted to add fuel to the flames, any way they could. Oh, it was just awful!” Kathryn paused and turned her splotchy-red face toward the wall. When she went on, her voice was softer.