Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  “Thank you for the amphora, Mister Segal,” Marco said. “And the next time you want to take a taxi, remember. Real cab drivers do not wear shorts.”

  * * * * *

  The tender took a silent bunch back to the ship. Rob Segal and Brittany announced they were clamming up until they spoke to their lawyer, and the only thing Bondurant got out of them was the key to the black case. Ollie and Lettie, beyond their part in the museum caper, still didn’t know what was going on. Villas followed Endicott around the boat because, in spite of everything, he still had no probable cause to handcuff or arrest him. Marco and I walked out on the stern deck and watched Santorini shrink toward the horizon.

  “I didn’t get to see Akrotiri today and yesterday I didn’t get to see the Palace of Knossos. I’m going to have to do this cruise again sometime.”

  Marco slid one arm around my waist and squeezed. He kissed my temple, then turned his face back to the sea. “I wish we had a few more days together. Could you fly with me to Florence tomorrow? I could show you places the tourists do not know about.”

  I paused a moment. I had to be sure I really meant the offer that was on the tip of my tongue. “Why don’t you wait a couple of days before you fly back? Lettie and Ollie and I are staying in Athens until Thursday. We have rooms at the Grande Bretagne.”

  “I am impressed.”

  “They’ll treat you like a king.”

  “I will call the caserma and ask if they can manage without me until Thursday.”

  I turned away from the rail and kissed him. “Do you believe me now? That Nigel Endicott is George Gaskill, reincarnated?” I could hardly believe it, but Marco didn’t answer me. What will it take to convince these blockheads? “Come on, Marco! We found him in a bathroom stall with Kathryn! Kathryn was crouched on the rim of the potty in a fetal position and he was holding her to keep her from falling off. If that wasn’t a husband and wife trying to avoid discovery, then it had to be a brand-new widow having a pretty bizarre rendezvous with a man she met four days ago. Which of those is more believable?”

  Marco raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  “Even if you believe Kathryn has flown straight into the arms of a new lover, the bathroom stall thing still makes no sense. If they were that hot to be together, why didn’t they stay on the boat where they have two lovely rooms? Or wait until they got back this afternoon?” I realized I was shouting and lowered my voice. “And, Marco, they were both fully dressed.”

  “There are still so many things that cannot be explained by saying, ‘George Gaskill did not die. He turned himself into Nigel Endicott.’ What about the blood? I am sure the DNA test will tell us the blood was George Gaskill’s, so what do you think he did? Go out on the deck, cut himself, smear the blood around to make it look like a fight, and then calmly walk back inside and turn himself into Nigel Endicott? Dotsy, there was at least a half-liter of blood. If he had cut himself that badly, he would have had to get medical attention, or he would have bled to death. That blood was not from a little cut!”

  A half-liter of blood. That part of Marco’s tirade echoed through my head and I did a rough metric-to-English conversion. That would be about a pint of blood. A pint of blood. Give a pint of blood. Help to save a life.

  “That’s it! What if George had a pint—I mean a half-liter— of his own blood with him? Wasn’t he scheduled for surgery right after this vacation? Heart surgery? People sometimes stockpile their own blood before surgery, for safety reasons. If he did that, who’s to say he didn’t bring a bag of his own blood with him? Oh dear. Would they let you bring blood on a plane?”

  “If you had authorization from a doctor, they would,” Marco said. “Va bene, you may have an idea here.”

  “The EDTA your people found in the blood sample you gave them. Mightn’t they use that to keep the blood from clotting in the bag? Didn’t Mrs. Ziegler say it was a blood thinner?”

  “You are too smart to be a woman.” Marco hugged me, and I elected to let the sexist comment slide. “If Bondurant will fingerprint Nigel Endicott when we get back to the ship, he could fax the prints to the FBI and they can easily compare them to the prints of George Gaskill. The Pennsylvania police have Gaskill in their files. We might know the answer as early as tomorrow.”

  It felt as if the clouds of confusion were beginning to dissipate. The engines under our feet shifted to a low rumble as we pulled up alongside the Aegean Queen. Folks lined up at the rail of the promenade deck waved down to us, and I felt the general movement of the passengers around me toward the ramp.

  “Luc Girard said he wished he had a video of the two of you trapping Rob Segal in the back of a cab.”

  “I must admit, I made a very good cab driver.”

  “I wish I had a video of Sophie catching the krater with one hand. She’d be drafted by the Steelers, immediately.”

  “What do you mean? Sophie would never steal.”

  When would I learn to avoid references to American sports when talking to Marco? Maybe I should have said “The Saints.” No, that wouldn’t do either.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Back aboard ship, I snatched the photos of George and Nigel off the displays in the photo shop and dashed across to the security office. Bondurant answered my knock on the door. He and Chief Letsos were in conference, but I barged past Bondurant and plunked the pictures down on Letsos’s desk.

  “Look. Here’s what I was telling you about. See the white, sort of triangular, piece of something in front of George Gaskill’s ear? Now look at Nigel Endicott.” I pointed to the second photo. “Identical piece of whatever, isn’t it? Put this together with the fact that we found Kathryn Gaskill and Nigel together in a men’s room stall on Santorini, and think about it.”

  Both men looked at the photos, and then Letsos picked up the one of George and looked at it closely. Bondurant did likewise with Nigel’s. They exchanged photos and studied some more. Bondurant mumbled something I didn’t catch. He dragged two passports across the desk and opened both of them to the first page.

  “As a matter of fact, we were discussing these before you came in, so, you see, I did take your idea seriously.” Bondurant looked sideways at me. “Look at this. George Gaskill’s passport. He immigrated into Athens, Greece, on June fifteenth.” I looked at the passport closely, as if I’d never seen it before. “And please note that this is the only stamp in the book. It’s a recently issued passport.” Bondurant flipped forward several pages and back to the photo page, handed it to me, then picked up the second passport.

  Letsos, meanwhile, sat hunched forward in his swivel chair, chewing an already shredded toothpick.

  Bondurant turned to the first visa/entry page in Nigel’s passport. “Endicott’s is also recently issued and has only two stamps. The first says he entered Istanbul, Turkey, on June fifteenth. Entering Turkey requires a visa. That’s what this sticker is for.” He pointed to the visa sticker. “And the second one says he entered Athens, Greece, on June seventeenth. That’s it.” He handed me that passport as well.

  He was right. Of course, I already knew what the passports had in them but Bondurant didn’t know I’d sneaked a peek at both of these when they were still in the safe. “Wait! I see how it could have been done!” I found myself telling Bondurant and Letsos an idea at the same moment it was forming in my mind. “Suppose George and Kathryn flew from the U.S. to Athens and George shows his own passport to the agent, but he has another one—this one—in another pocket.” I held up Nigel’s document.

  “He takes the next flight from Athens to Istanbul and shows Nigel’s passport to the Turkish agent. The stamp says he entered Turkey, but it doesn’t say from where. The passport tells us he’s an American citizen but it doesn’t say he was on a flight from America. So he stays in Istanbul a day or so, then catches another flight back to Athens, gets the second stamp, and rejoins his wife before they head for the ship.”

  Bondurant looked as if he’d been slapped.

  “And ano
ther thing. When we all boarded that first day, Lettie Osgood noticed a man in a brightly colored shirt going the wrong direction down the gangway toward the security gate. We even started calling him the wrong-way man. So what if George and Kathryn came aboard like a normal couple, got their picture taken, went to their room where George quickly zipped off his false goatee, his hairpiece, changed shirts . . . took out his contacts and put on regular glasses . . .” It was all coming to me so fast it scared me. “He gelled up his real hair, took out his fake front teeth . . . but forgot about the little piece of tissue he’d stuck on earlier when he’d cut himself shaving! All he had to do then was to go back down the gangway, slip around the metal-detector gate, pick up the backpack he’d stashed somewhere in the terminal building, and come back through. Get his picture taken again.”

  Bondurant didn’t say anything.

  Letsos finally growled out, “Security doesn’t let people go back through the checkpoint after they’ve already boarded.”

  “Would they even notice? They’re concentrating on people getting on. They have no reason to care who gets off.”

  Bondurant cleared his throat. “Let’s get Endicott in here. Right now.”

  * * * * *

  It was the last morning of our cruise. Ollie, Lettie, Marco, and I sat drinking coffee at the same table on the Poseidon deck where we’d sat that first day. In a few hours the Aegean Queen would dock once again in Piraeus Harbor. Marco had told his office not to expect him before Friday and he’d promised to see the National Museum and the Acropolis with me. I’d promised to do a night on the town with him.

  Ollie raised his hat, ran his hand over his bald head, and replaced the hat. He’d learned, the hard way, to protect his vulnerable dome from the strong Greek sun. “I talked to Stone and Leclercq last evening. They were happy to hear the three of us are no longer suspects. The very idea! To think any of us would have killed a man over a poker game. It all sounds stupid, now.”

  “It was those shifty eyes of yours, Ollie,” Lettie said.

  “I still have questions, though, especially about Malcolm Stone,” I said. “He’s been up to something because everywhere we’ve stopped, he’s either picked up something, or else I’ve seen him sneaking around . . . furtively.”

  Lettie wiggled her fingers spookily at me. “Oooh! Furtive sneaking!”

  David Bondurant and Dimitris Villas came to our table and asked if they could join us. They pulled up two extra chairs. Bondurant sat, leaned back, and stretched his legs out in front of him. He was more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. “Two birds with one stone. How sweet it is!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we solved both murders at the same time. We got those two birds in the office last night and they sang like canaries.” Bondurant paused as if he was surprised by his own wit. “And, Dotsy, I have to hand it to you. You nailed it. The little switcheroo Gaskill pulled with the passports was exactly like you guessed.”

  “Who said I was guessing?”

  “There is no Nigel Endicott. Anymore. George Gaskill stole his identity after he died a couple of years ago. There was a real Nigel Endicott but the man who’d been posing, periodically, as Endicott was Gaskill. He bought the farm in Vermont, got to know a few folks in that area, established credit, bank accounts, driver’s license, all that stuff, in his Endicott guise.”

  “So they had been planning this for a long time,” Marco said.

  “Yes. Seems Gaskill’s whole life was well and truly ruined after he became a convicted child molester. He and Kathryn, over the years, built up such a hatred for Brittany Benson, they wanted revenge. They decided George had to get a new identity, start fresh without the cloud of ‘registered sex offender’ following him everywhere he went. Best way to do that was to make it look like he was dead.

  “They knew about the law that says unless you have a dead body, a person can’t be declared dead until he’s been missing for seven years, but they read about a man who fell off a cruise ship and was quickly declared dead. The premise being that a human can’t swim all that far, so if he’s not on board and there were no other vessels in the area to pick him up, he’s a goner. So the Gaskills took out a big life insurance policy on George and began establishing his new identity. He got some fake teeth that fit over his regular ones, grew a goatee, started wearing a hairpiece to work and to church. He’d been doing this for some months so people had got used to him looking like that. A couple of weeks ago, he shaved off the goatee and started wearing a false one.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because if he appeared on the ship with a newly-shaven face, the difference between the tan on his cheeks and his chin would have been noticeable.”

  Marco stroked his own newly-shaven chin and grinned at me.

  “And then, from old friends back in Pennsylvania, they learned Brittany Benson was working as a dancer on a cruise ship and—ta da!—let’s get Brittany blamed for George’s death. That would be a final justice. Let the girl who’d ruined his life learn what it feels like to get convicted of something you didn’t do.”

  “I have a confession,” I said. “I emailed my son back home. He’s a high school principal like George was and he knows educators from Pennsylvania. So I asked him to find out about the Gaskill-Benson trial.” Five pairs of eyes looked at me as if I’d told them I was a hacker. “He found that virtually everyone thought the charges were trumped up by Brittany and her friends, but the local political climate at the time was such that neither judge nor jury dared let the man go Scot-free.”

  “But to convict him of a sexual offense against a child?” Lettie interjected, scowling.

  “That’s not as serious as the actual rape of a child.”

  Bondurant took over again. “Once the Gaskills started talking last night, we couldn’t shut them up. They got it all off their chests. It seems that when George was going ashore in Mykonos, dressed as Endicott and wearing the sort of bright, splashy shirt conservative old George Gaskill would never wear, Papadakos was on the dock taking pictures and recognized him as Gaskill. He’d probably already looked at the embarkation pictures he took the day before and noticed the similarity. He may have noticed the little piece of tissue that Dotsy did, who knows? At any rate, Gaskill says Papadakos yelled out, “Hey, who are you? You came aboard with a wife, and then you came aboard without a wife. Where is your wife?”

  “So George had to kill him.”

  “George had to kill him, and he had to kill him fast. He couldn’t wait for Papadakos to blab that around the ship. It was too late for them to abandon their plan because they’d already done the bloody deck thing and three law enforcement groups were working on it.

  “He told us he bought the knife in one store, bought one of those thin, disposable rain coats in another store, and tracked Papadakos down. Followed him, shoved him into an alley when he saw his chance. And killed him.”

  “But fifteen stab wounds?” Marco frowned. “Why did he stab him so many times? He was not angry at the man, he just wanted him dead.”

  “He didn’t know what he was doing,” Bondurant said. “This was his first murder and he made a royal mess of it.”

  “I have another question,” I said. “Yesterday when I passed Kathryn on donkey back, she was on her cell phone. George would’ve been in the cable car at that time. Looking back on it now, I think she must have been informing George I was onto them. But how did she know?”

  Bondurant winked and touched his temple. “Aha. She told us that, too. She was on the tender we were on going over to the island and was standing outside the cabin when you were telling the rest of us Nigel was actually George and George wasn’t dead. She heard that through the open window, and hid out in the ladies’ room until we docked. She slipped past us while we were huddled up discussing our plans, ran ashore, and grabbed a donkey. She assumed none of us would choose that path when we could take the cable car instead.”

  “And as soon as Brittany got away from me
, after Sophie and I snatched the krater, she called Rob Segal.”

  “Poor Dimitris,” Marco said, punching Villas on the shoulder. “When you hopped out, both of your suspects ran away.”

  We all had to laugh.

  “What about the watch?” Lettie asked. “Who actually put it in Brittany’s closet?”

  “Kathryn Gaskill. She made up some story and got a cabin boy to open the room for her. She told us she really felt bad when they started accusing Ollie and the other two men in the poker game, so she planted the watch to throw suspicion back on Brittany.”

  “How cruel,” I said.

  “Not as cruel as it would’ve been to let me hang for it,” Ollie said, and he looked dead serious.

  * * * * *

  I followed Lettie and Ollie to their room while Marco slipped away to his own room to finish packing. Lettie shifted one suitcase from the middle of the floor to clear a path between me and the sofa. Ollie walked into their bathroom and emerged with a double handful of bottles and brushes.

  “As you can see, we aren’t quite packed up yet,” Lettie said. “We have a bit more stuff than we came with.” She pursed her mouth and squinted at Ollie. “I’ve squished four big vacuum bags flat. They’re all full of sponges.”

  “Really, Ollie,” I said. “Do you think you’ll need all those sponges?”

  There was a knock at the door. It was Luc and Sophie. “Dotsy, Sophie and I want to thank you for introducing us to each other. It’s hard to believe we’ve been on the same boat for weeks and it took a total stranger to bring us together.” He had his arm around her waist. “And I’m grateful to both you and Mrs. Osgood for discovering the stolen artifacts that had been right under my nose all along.”

  “Are they all recovered?”