by Jane Haddam
Bennis was sitting up a little straighter. “I see,” she said. “He’s been talking about discrepancies in the cash flow reports for the time of the original Europabanc offer—but Gregor, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Of course it does,” Gregor said. “Baird Financial wanted to merge with Europabanc, which in this case meant that they wanted to buy it. Unfortunately, they didn’t actually have the money to buy it. Everybody has told me that. Mark Anderwahl came right out and said it to me at dinner last night, before all the mess started. Baird Financial didn’t have the money, so somebody faked the cash-on-hand reports to make it look like they did. That didn’t matter once the formal preagreements were signed, but at that point what would matter was actually having the cash. Where do you think they were going to get it?”
“From selling the junk bond portfolio McAdam had put together?”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “It was a good portfolio, right?”
“It was a great portfolio,” Bennis said. “A least four emerging companies that look like first-class winners in the next decade and all for issues with stock conversion provisions—good Lord, everybody wanted those things.”
“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “They didn’t want them if they would benefit McAdam.”
Bennis protested. “They would have eventually, Gregor. Money is money.”
“Eventually wasn’t good enough,” Gregor pointed out. “They’re going to close on the Europabanc deal—when? Right after we get back from this trip?”
“Around Christmas or just after.”
“Fine. So Baird Financial had to have the cash on hand by then. Before it could do that it had to get rid of McAdam. It had managed to get rid of him to the extent of paying him off, but from what I’ve heard that hadn’t made people happy, either. If McAdam hadn’t died—”
“It might have taken months to put that auction together,” Bennis said. “I see what you mean. You might be right.”
“I might be wrong, but I’ll bet you this. Nobody at Baird Financial was going to take the risk that a Donald McAdam with an executed golden parachute was going to be looked on any more kindly by his enemies than a Donald McAdam without one.”
“So, in order to make sure that the money was in place to do the Europabanc deal, someone at Baird Financial murdered Donald McAdam.”
“Right. Now, think about this. If you knew you were going to kill Donald McAdam, why would it be necessary to execute the gold parachute agreement? Why bother with that part of it at all? Why not just kill the man and get it over with?”
Bennis looked confused. “I don’t know. I—maybe it wasn’t the same person. Maybe Jon Baird wanted to give McAdam the golden parachute, and somebody else, Calvin Baird maybe, wanted to kill him, only Calvin couldn’t come right out and tell Jon that he was going to off McAdam—”
“Why not just kill him before the contracts were handed over? Why wait until the last minute?”
“I don’t know.” Bennis looked dispirited.
Gregor moved away from where he had been standing, leaning up against the side of the bunk. There seemed to be a little more motion under them now than there had been. Over their heads, men were calling to each other in tight and urgent voices. Other men—it might have been women, too, it was hard to tell—were running. Gregor heard a pounding of footsteps that sounded like large hailstones hitting against a roof.
“I think we’re about to stop being becalmed,” he said. “Is that what all this activity sounds like to you?”
“I don’t know,” Bennis told him. She walked past him, climbed into the bunk, and looked out the porthole there. She pulled back, shaking her head. “There’s a little more motion to the sea,” she reported, “but I don’t see it’s all that much different than it has been. I don’t know what’s going on up above. Maybe we ought to go and see.”
“Maybe we should.”
“Maybe if I think about this a little longer, I’ll get it all straightened out in my head.” She climbed all the way out of the bunk, fixed her clothes, and went back to her chair. Instead of sitting down in it, she brushed off the seat in that unconsciously neat way she had and then walked over to the locker to get her jacket. Her hair no longer seemed as wet as it had when Gregor had first come into the cabin, but it still looked slick. Gregor found himself wondering why he always liked it best when Bennis looked a mess. Bennis looking perfect made him uncomfortable.
“Ready?” he asked her.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Put something on your head,” he told her. “Your hair’s wet. You’re going to give yourself a sore throat.”
“I never get a sore throat,” Bennis said.
She brushed past him, out into the passage. He came out behind her just as a pair of legs disappeared up the staircase to the deck above. He made a mental note that they looked like Sheila Baird’s legs and then ushered Bennis formally down the passage. It was the sort of thing he had no idea if she liked but that he was too used to doing to give up.
Bennis had her foot on the bottom step of the staircase when the shouting started—and the screaming, too, because after the first startled “Hey! What are you doing!” the next thing they heard was definitely a woman’s shriek. Bennis spun around to him in alarm and grabbed him by the lapels.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s sounds like someone else is getting murdered.”
“They’re not,” Gregor said calmly.
“How can you possibly know? Can’t you hear that screaming? We’ve got to hurry.”
“I’ve been hurrying ever since I got here. I’m through. The screaming is only Fritzie Baird, having hysterics.”
“But Gregor—”
“But Gregor nothing,” Gregor said. Bennis was still blocking his way on the stairs. He lifted her out of the way and started up himself. “Do you know what that is you hear? That’s the—wait. Listen to the splash.”
There was a splash. There was a very loud splash. Somebody above them yelled, “Man overboard!”
“Corpse overboard,” Gregor said wearily. “That’s Charlie Shay, being tossed to the sharks by Jon or Tony Baird, it doesn’t matter which. And don’t tell me I ought to go up there and dive in after it, because I can’t swim very well and Charlie Shay’s pockets are probably stuffed full of rocks. Let’s go upstairs and get hold of our murderer.”
Bennis grabbed his calf, firmly and painfully. “Gregor,” she said, “just last night you went to no end of trouble to make sure that corpse stayed on this boat.”
“I know.”
“Now you’re telling me the corpse is no longer on the boat and you don’t care?”
“I think it’s too bad for Charlie Shay. It doesn’t matter.”
“But Gregor—”
“Besides,” Gregor said, “I’ve been chasing that thing from one end of this ship to the other, and I’m sick of it.”
Part Three
Finis
One
1
CALVIN BAIRD HAD NEVER been under any delusions that he was a respected man. As a child he had been something of a joke—Jon Baird’s not so bright, not so sharp younger brother—and as an adult he had survived mainly through protective coloration. Fortunately, he was equipped with all the necessary accoutrements of camouflage. He could have had a body that matched what he imagined his soul to be. Instead, to people he didn’t know, he appeared positively aristocratic, the epitome of the Eastern seaboard Brahmin, the ultimate representative of WASP superiority. It was an impression he used to good effect when he was among strangers. He could go into a charity ball or a White House task force on the problem of the moment and be reported out as a paragon. It was only among people he did know that he had trouble—and now, of course, he was definitely among people he knew. He couldn’t get away from them. Calvin Baird hated a great many things about boat trips like this one, whether provided with decent plumbing or not, but what he hated most was his forced proximity to all the people who knew him too
well. He couldn’t even fall back on his position in the firm. Here, he didn’t have a position in the firm. He was supposed to be family. He had only one thing to be thankful for in this situation. He had just asked his latest wife for a divorce, and because of that he hadn’t had to put up with her presence on this boat. Since the younger of his two stepdaughters was coming out this year at the Grosvenor, which took place on the day after Thanksgiving, he wouldn’t have had to put up with her in any case.
Since what he did have to put up with was intolerable, Calvin had decided, this morning, not to fight with the “shower.” He knew all about that “shower,” and he didn’t think it was worth it. They were supposed to have an “authentic” Thanksgiving when they got to Candle Island, but Calvin knew all about that, too. There was indeed an authentic Puritan cabin there, taken apart stick by stick from its place at the center of a small town in Massachusetts and reassembled where Jon thought it would do the most good. It had roughly planed log walls and a big black stove for heat and an outhouse in the trees out back. Jon always told his guests it was the only building on the island. It wasn’t. On the other side, where the coast was too rocky to allow for any approach by sea, there was another cabin. It was also log, but it had come from Rocky Mountain Log Homes and been assembled by a first-class builder. It had six bathrooms, including one with a Jacuzzi for four. Calvin thought he could wait to get there before he cleaned up, especially since he knew that getting there wouldn’t take them long.
What he couldn’t wait for was to clean up these numbers. In spite of the fact that nobody else seemed to care, Calvin could not force himself to abandon the effort. He had the papers he had been going over with Jon stacked up in his cabin. He’d gotten up once or twice in the night to look them over again. Now, with sunlight streaming thinly through his porthole, he picked them up again and looked at the sheet at the top of the stack. It wasn’t a particularly important sheet, no more important than the sheets underneath it. It offended him anyway.
Calvin had a brass carriage clock sitting in a hollow on the table next to the chair next to his door. It was the same brass carriage clock he had on his desk in his office in New York. He had bought it through the Tiffany’s catalog nearly a dozen years ago and took it everywhere. It said nine forty-five—nearly an hour since the expedition to the showers had started—and Calvin found that satisfactory. By now, those who had been at the head of the line ought to be back upstairs. That included Bennis Hannaford, whom Calvin did not want to see, and probably Jon, whom he did. It was hard to tell, with Jon. He might have been excruciatingly polite, which would mean he would still be at the “showers,” waiting his turn, determined to go last. He might have taken charge and insisted on his own priorities, which meant he would have been the first one through. Given the way Jon had been behaving on this trip, Calvin picked the prize behind door number two.
He tucked the papers under his arm and let himself out into the passageway. He saw Tony Baird come storming down from the main deck and go on storming to the deck below. He saw Bennis Hannaford come up a moment later and let herself into her own cabin. Everything looked normal. Calvin went down the passage to the door to Jon’s cabin and knocked. He was disappointed when his knock was answered by Sheila, who looked bleary-eyed and resentful.
“I don’t know where he is,” she told him, without waiting for him to speak. “He’s not here.”
Then she slammed the door in his face.
Calvin looked down at the papers in his hand and frowned. A door opened back along the passage and Fritzie Baird came out of the mess hall. The mess hall seemed like a good idea. Even Jon had to eat. Calvin decided to go there.
He walked up to the mess hall door, opened it, and looked inside. It was empty, but there was a pile of corn muffins on the table. There was also a scattered collection of plates, covered with crumbs, as if almost everybody else on the boat had been in and had breakfast before him. Then there were the mason jars, three or four of them, nestled now in a pile of not-so-artfully arranged corn husks. None of the mason jars was open, and Calvin wasn’t surprised. Like most of the people connected in one way or another with Jon Baird during Jon’s long marriage to Fritzie, Calvin had received his share of Fritzie’s special gift marmalades. He’d eaten his share, too. He wasn’t likely to volunteer for an assignment like that again.
Calvin went into the mess hall, leaving the door swinging open behind him—a really bad idea on a boat, he knew that, he could just never make himself remember—and approached the food. It wasn’t Thanksgiving breakfast food, if there was such a thing, but then Calvin could never keep the details of holidays straight. He looked over the table and saw that the butter was almost entirely gone. What was left of it looked strangely arranged in the crocks. If he hadn’t known it was insane, he would have said that someone had been eating the stuff with a spoon.
Calvin put his papers down, picked up a corn muffin, and used one of the clean knives to put what little butter there was left on it. He had finished just about half of it when he heard footsteps in the passage that seemed to be coming his way. He looked up, hoping to see Jon, and saw Mark Anderwahl instead. Mark was moving much too fast to be intending to stop, but once he saw Calvin he seemed to change his mind. He had gone a little past the mess hall door. He stopped, backed up, and stuck his head inside.
“Do you know where I could find some baking soda?” he asked Calvin.
Calvin blinked. He hadn’t expected anyone else to have spent a sleepless night over the discrepancies in the cash-on-hand reports for better than a year ago, but—baking soda? Mark Anderwahl looked flushed and upset.
“I suppose they have baking soda in the kitchen,” Calvin said. “What do you need baking soda for?”
“I have to make flares.”
“Flares?”
“Flares,” Mark Anderwahl repeated. “We’ve got to call the Coast Guard some way. We can’t go along the way we have been.”
Calvin Baird frowned. He hadn’t been paying much attention to what had been going on. He hadn’t been close to Charlie Shay, and he hadn’t needed to be convinced that Jon’s theory was absolutely right. Charlie had had a fit of apoplexy, an aneurism, or a respiratory convulsion. Gregor Demarkian was just being annoying by insisting on calling it death by strychnine, which was something that would turn out not to be true. Calvin had never put too much stock in detectives, even in famous ones. What was a detective but a glorified police officer, and what was a police officer but a man who with worse luck would have ended up working the line at Ford? In Calvin’s mind, the most important thing now was to stand behind Jon and not contradict him.
“We’re not going along,” he told Mark Anderwahl. “We’re going to Candle Island. We can get hold of the Coast Guard or the police or whoever from there.”
“It’ll be hours before we get to Candle Island at least,” Mark said stubbornly. “It may be a day or more. We haven’t had any wind for hours. We hardly have any now.”
“But it doesn’t matter,” Calvin insisted. “Charlie’s dead. It isn’t as though we had to rush him to a hospital. There’s nothing to get all worked up about.”
“There’s Julie,” Mark said.
“Julie?”
“Julie’s pregnant.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mark looked exasperated. “How can you not understand what it means to be pregnant?” he demanded. Then he turned around and began walking down the passage again, calling back over his shoulder, “I’m going to find the kitchen and get some baking soda. We need flares.” He reached the stairs to the deck below, started down them, and was gone.
Calvin Baird had a very straightforward mind. He believed in doing what you were supposed to do when you were supposed to do it, which was not the same thing as believing in staying within the law. First and foremost there was loyalty to family. In this family, loyalty meant loyalty to Jon. Calvin Baird didn’t believe that any of this nonsense should have a claim on his valuable attent
ion. Charlie Shay and Mark Anderwahl and strychnine and flares were no more serious to him than the midnight creature feature shows the theaters held on Halloween. He wanted to go back to his cabin and work over his numbers one more time. He felt constrained by what he was sure he owed to the family enterprise. He did go back to his cabin—after eating a corn muffin and wishing he’d got to the food before all the other kinds were gone—but all he did there was put his papers back on the table and lock up behind himself after he left.
Then he went where he should have gone to begin with, which was straight downstairs. He should have realized. No matter how much Jon wanted to be the first one in and out of the showers, the first one cleaned and ready to take up the business of the day, he much less wanted to leave these people alone with Charlie Shay’s dead body.
2
Actually, Jon Baird was not particularly worried about leaving these people alone with Charlie Shay’s body. As far as he could tell, the only person who wanted to be left alone with it was Gregor Demarkian, and Gregor Demarkian was up and about, wandering around the boat somewhere. Jon had seen him leave the cabin where the corpse was kept much earlier. It was possible to see the door to that cabin from where Jon was standing only if you bent over and leaned sideways. Unlike the deck above, the passage down here was not straight. Jon spent a fair amount of his time scrunched into that position. He wanted to know what was going on. The answer turned out to be simple enough. Nothing was going on. By the time it was his turn under the water, everyone else had gone upstairs and the coast was clear.
Most of the rest of the people who had taken showers this morning had taken very short showers. The position they had to stand in and the temperature of the water were both uncomfortable. Jon almost enjoyed himself. He’d noticed as soon as he’d taken the first sip of the drink Sheila had handed him last night that the drink was drugged—with Sheila’s sleeping pills, naturally, the woman had no imagination—but he’d tossed off about a third of it anyway, before he’d “lost” the rest in the cabinet drawer beside his bed. He’d thought he could use the relaxation. He’d never taken a sleeping pill before. He thought now that they were probably a mistake, at least for him. He woke up with a fuzzier head than any he’d ever gotten from a hangover.