Death Sets Sail_A Mystery

by Dale E. Manolakas

  I described what I had seen in detail.

  “Those aren’t heart attack symptoms!”

  “Mary agrees, and so does Sean.”

  “They do?”

  “Yes, nothing computes. So, I spent the day researching the symptoms. I don’t know what killed him, but it was definitely not a heart attack.”

  “You should have come to me straight away.” Elias stroked his moustache with his forefinger thoughtfully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Behind this exciting Greek-cook exterior and mild-mannered mystery writer lies the wisdom of Socrates and the skills of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Really?”

  I was curious at the claims made by this recipe-writer. I assumed he was exaggerating and puffing, as we all know Greeks love to do.

  “Yes, my dear. Really!”

  “Then what did kill him, my master?” I chided, not expecting an answer.

  “Prolixin,” Elias whispered. “Since you asked.”

  “Prolixin!”

  “Tasteless, odorless, and clear.”

  “The symptoms?”

  “They all fit. I believe it was an allergic reaction to his Prolixin prescription. In fact, I will stake my reputation on it. Many novices would mistake it for a heart attack.”

  “But a doctor, too?”

  “Well, he’s not really a doctor’s doctor, is he? He’s a Wessex Cruise Line toady.”

  “I have to agree, having seen him in action. But how? How do you know so much about Prolixin?”

  “Simple. I had the killer in my Mousaka Murders put liquid Prolixin in his wife’s wine to kill her,” Elias winked at me. “It did the job. And, it did it with the same symptoms you have told me. I researched it thoroughly. It’s an anti-psychotic drug and knowing Mendel’s ego there is no way he would think of himself as psychotic . . . or ever admit it.”

  Elias chuckled and then added, “We all think of ourselves as normal don’t we?”

  I was impressed. I also sadly realized that I was, actually, not as knowledgeable as these published writers. And, clearly not even the equal of the lower echelon of food mystery writers like Elias. He made his money on silly cooking plots and I had always looked down my nose at that contrived conceit. But evidently it took a stockpile of research and fine-honed knowledge to have a character commit murder-through-food in a book—and not get caught for over ninety-five thousand words of running, covering-up, and avoiding arrest until the climax.

  Then my imagination soared, my suspicion of wrongdoing against Mendel now intensified. I probed the superior brain next to me.

  “And, in an article I read today Mendel’s agent denied Mendel took any drugs, except prescribed Synthroid, and also said there was no history of heart trouble.”

  “Interesting . . .” Elias held me in suspense for a long pregnant pause. “. . . very interesting.”

  “Talk, Elias! Tell me what you are thinking.”

  “First, we can assume Mendel did recreational drugs and the agent is covering up like they all do.”

  “Of course.” I agreed, after all I lived in the orbit of the film and music scene in Santa Monica and was a part of the acting world—a small part, but a part.

  “More significantly I believe that the agent was being candid about Mendel’s health. Those folks scrupulously monitor their meal tickets. If Prolixin is the culprit, it obviously was not a voluntary ingestion,” Elias leaned over and whispered in my ear, his mustache tickling through my long hair. “So . . . it has to be murder any way you cut it . . . murder amongst us!”

  I gasped at Elias’s clear and unequivocal validation of my own thoughts. “But . . . who? Why? How?”

  “Well, therein ‘lies the rub’ as Shakespeare would say. Doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “I did this exact research for my book. First, you have to be bipolar to get it prescribed, so with a little acting you can get a prescription and doctor-shop with another identity. Second, and most importantly, it’s even easier to get on the Internet . . . for anyone with a brain. It comes in a little orange pill or liquid. Liquid’s what I used it in my book. It is accessible and perfect to put the person’s food or drink.”

  “But you say anyone can get it. So why . . . would . . .?”

  “You ask just the right question, Veronica. Why . . . we need to know the why to discover the who! Simple.”

  “Not so simple if you . . .”

  I was going to bring up Otto’s murder being so close in time then suddenly, the table shook as if struck by the 6.7 Northridge Earthquake in 1994 that hit Santa Monica, too. Helga had jumped up, slammed her fists on the table, and zeroed in on Brent and Heather exchanging business cards.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Helga shrieked and charged over to them, her feet barely touching the floor.

  Helga leaned down into Heather’s beautiful face. Heather’s round sapphire eyes opened even bigger than their natural luscious size. Her white skin turned red down to her decoupage peeking from a modestly scooped black top adorned with a delicate gold chain. Helga grabbed both cards, ripped them up, and threw them in Heather’s startled face.

  “Get the hell away from him!” Helga spat. “He’s mine! And no plump, fertile piece of ass is going to . . .”

  “Helga!” Brent pulled her back. “Stop. Heather’s husband is an entertainment lawyer in New York. An up and coming associate in a prominent and highly respected entertainment law firm there. She says he loves your work. We were only talking about you becoming a client!”

  “Oh . . . I . . .” Helga stood up straight and adjusted her shimmering silver evening blouse back over her black silk skirt.

  “Well.” Helga thought a moment and then she pasted a red lip-sticked smile across her face for Heather. “Sorry, dear.”

  Heather sat frozen staring at Brent calming Helga with exaggerations; Heather’s husband had only just started at his law firm and actually had never read Helga’s books—just Heather had.

  “Give her another card, Brent.” Helga, unfazed at the spectacle and staring diners, strutted back to her seat. She ordered a third champagne cocktail.

  “I’m so sorry, Heather.”

  Brent obeyed and put another card on the table. Heather sat frozen. Brent looked sheepishly around the disturbed dining room, held his head up, but not as high as usual, and followed Helga back to his own side of the table. Brent slid in next to Helga. He quietly drank his wine and buried himself in the menu.

  “Excuse me.” Heather stood with tears brimming in her eyes.

  She grabbed her velvet black evening jacket and evening bag. She made her way through the tables to the staircase and out of the dining room. She left Brent’s card next to her plate.

  “I’ll take care of this, Elias. Order for Heather and me if you have to.” I followed Heather.

  I went because I felt for the young woman, but my motives were not altogether altruistic. I wanted information about Otto’s program and his last days. I also wanted insight into Mendel’s background. The two deaths were too close to be independent. In this emotional, vulnerable moment I was confident that Heather would be unguarded and open. I was in search of the why that Elias had stated earlier was the key to finding the who.

  In point of fact, what mystery writer hadn’t written this emotionally charged scene with a beautiful woman who knew something she didn’t know that she knew? It had been written a million times to further the plot and to elicit otherwise unreachable and seemingly unimportant facts.

  Truly, at the very beginning of suspicions lie the creative impulses that make an investigation bear fruit. I had concluded that after my few encounters with crime.

  ⌘

  Chapter 17

  Anticipation and Consummation

  I caught up with Heather at the elevators. Her long blond hair shimmered down her back set off by her black velvet evening jacket.

  “Wait! Don’t go.”

  Heather turned gracefully l
ike a cat. Tears streamed from her round sapphire blue eyes past her waterproof mascara down her face. She wiped them away.

  “I’m going back and ordering room service.”

  “Don’t. I’ve only known Helga for two days now, but I’ve seen her behave just as badly several times. No one takes her seriously and she’s forgotten it by now.”

  “But I can’t go back.”

  “Please. You can’t let her ruin your evening. Cruelty is a knee-jerk reaction with her . . . in case you haven’t noticed. We all condemn her, but, like Brent, we can’t stop her. What can any of us do? Don’t let her spoil your evening . . . or ours.”

  “That’s so sweet, but how can I face her?”

  “Easily. We all know she is paranoid when it comes to Brent. It wasn’t you. It’s her. And we like you. Which is more than any of us can say for Helga.”

  “Thank you.” Heather took a deep breath.

  “Let’s sit over here a minute.”

  “Alright.”

  We headed for the alcove seats.

  “There isn’t one of us Helga hasn’t attacked, or will attack, before the cruise is over. We all have to just let it roll off.”

  We sat in an alcove near the elevators with a large window looking out into the blackness of the Atlantic Ocean at night. I looked down at the foam churned by the ship and dramatically lit by the ships lights. I had her alone. I planned my entree into a discussion of Otto’s program and Otto’s last day.

  Then, Heather made it easy.

  “You know,” Heather said. “I signed up for the cruise to celebrate Otto’s life and then he died. But I came anyway . . . to share my loss.”

  “I didn’t know Otto, but his death is a tragedy.”

  “It really is, at least to me. He believed in me and helped me get my first book published while I was in his program five years ago. And, even though my husband does some entertainment law, truthfully, he’s really new at it. Otto had contacts to help me sell my book for a movie.”

  “That’s wonderful. You were young to publish.”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Really!” As a glorified imposter I was impressed that she had published at all, let alone at twenty-one.

  “Amy Miller was younger . . . twenty.” Heather smiled.

  “Oh?”

  “I ran into her our first day out of New York. She’s an agent now. I didn’t get a chance to ask her why she stopped writing, but I’d like to know . . . being kindred spirits.”

  “Of course.” I prodded for more insight.

  “And now she has to deal with Mendel’s death, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think she was close to him. There were old-time pictures of her and Mendel and Frederick together in Otto’s office. They looked like the three musketeers together . . . and happy.”

  “I didn’t know that.” But one thing I did know was that they were definitely anything but close now.

  Heather chatted away and became calmer as she did. Her eyes lit up when she talked about Otto’s program.

  “I know I’ve published a lot since the program . . . science fiction you know . . . but Otto truly empathized with me about my science fiction rut. A lucrative rut, but a rut. I know that sounds silly, but I always thought I had more in me as a writer . . . and Otto . . . well . . . he agreed. He inspired me to test my boundaries.”

  “He inspired a lot of writers.”

  “You know that I came on the cruise because I was thinking of moving into mysteries or combining soft science fiction with a mystery overlay?”

  “Yes, I heard. It’s a good mix. The structure of mystery, I imagine, is easier than science fiction—with the crimes and then the solutions to them. But, it may bore you after the complexity of science fiction.”

  “No. Not at all. I would emphasize character development. It’s hard to do that in science fiction. Doing mysteries I feel I could be more authentic . . . more creative. Human nature is what really excites me and that comes out more when you get away from science fiction . . . I think, anyway. Otto agreed with me.”

  “He advises writers after the program . . . forever it seems.” I was trying to get to my questions.

  “Yes.”

  “You were in touch with him his last days. Did the police ever speak to you?”

  “No, why would they?”

  At that moment, I knew then she’d never make it as a mystery writer. How could she not see that murder began close to home—almost always. She was not only in his home near the end; she seemed to be part of his family. She had to have some insight, some facts about his death.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Was he helping anyone else? Anyone who would know more about his death? Someone in your class, maybe?”

  “Good thought.”

  Echoing silently through my head was a silent, sarcastic “You think, Ms. Science Fiction?” But I bit my sarcastic tongue and said, “Just brainstorming.”

  “I still have friends from my class, but they avoid Otto.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t like him. They don’t like that he takes credit for other people’s successes and don’t want him taking any credit for theirs. But, I say give credit where it’s due.”

  “Oh, me too,” I agreed disingenuously. “But there must be other reasons, too.”

  “Maybe. My best friend, Anita, from my first year . . .”

  “Anita?”

  “Anita Valdes. She won’t even talk about him or the program. But I think that’s because she doesn’t write any more. She says her muse is gone.”

  I, of course, didn’t bring up my own recalcitrant muse or my belief, born of hope that muses do return. Some writers thought that absent muses never returned, especially if trauma interfered or made it dormant for years. I knew that my poor muse was just starving for me to give it my full attention and stop playing author out-and-about in the real world. It wanted me to get back to the lives of my characters in the printed and the fictional world of words being created in my books.

  “Why is it gone?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I think she’s jealous of my success and my close relationship with Otto. Of the close relationship I had with Otto, I mean.”

  “Interesting.” I thought of the womanizing angle Frederick had alluded to. “Did they have a personal relationship?”

  “What do you . . . oh! No. Of course not! He’s older.”

  I let it go and didn’t say that men are never too old. “What about the days just before he was murdered? Did he say anything to you?”

  “Wait! Do you think one of his students did it?”

  “Oh, no.” I hedged because I knew now that animosity, if not hatred, graduated with many of his students in the program. “I was just curious because you spoke to him that evening. Maybe someone saw something.”

  “Ah.”

  I was nonplussed again. How could Heather not see the relevance and be probing into Otto’s death with her proximity to him in the last days of his life? I now was even more convinced she would never be a mystery writer, like me. She might get published, but it would be a mere “halo effect” rubbing off from her reputation as a science fiction writer. It would be undeserved.

  “What did you talk about the night he was murdered? Do you remember?”

  I was getting impatient with this wide-eyed adorable woman who appeared to be an idiot savant unaware of normal life. And, certainly, unaware of the proper and instinctive concerns ingrained in all suspicious and trained investigators of human foibles and evil—namely, mystery writers.

  “Just me going into the mystery genre. But now that we’re talking about it, I . . . I think he was expecting someone, because he did cut our conversation short.”

  “Who? A woman or a man?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say. But, from my end of the phone I heard him pop a wine cork and clatter around with a couple of glasses.” Heather dismissed the subject. “But I feel better now and you’re right, I’m
not going to let Helga ruin my evening. Let’s go back.

  “All right.”

  “How’s my face?”

  “Perfect.” Sadly for all of us less fortunate, that was literally true. “Just wipe a little under your eyes.”

  I knew this conversation was a dead end. Heather was candid and couldn’t add much more about that night because she was, at heart, just exactly what she had always been—a science fiction writer —an unsuspicious, unobservant, obtuse science fiction writer, whose imagination was her real world.

  “Good thing I wear waterproof mascara.” Heather giggled.

  “I’m surprised you wear any with those long lashes.”

  “Thanks, but we all need help.”

  Some more than others, I thought as we headed back to the dining room. In the back of my mind, I reserved the right to take another run at her about Otto at some other opportune time, if not about the night he was murdered.

  “You know I spent my whole youth writing poetry in school instead of listening to my teachers,” Heather confided in me as we walked back to the dining room. “Every year I would send five new poems into the Poetry Society of America to become a member. But they never let me in.”

  “That’s precocious.” I was genuinely impressed. “Are you a member now?’

  “No. But I applied again this year. I’m going to knock on their door forever.”

  “You’re tougher than you look . . . all that rejection . . . and going back, even now, after your successes. I don’t think I could do that.”

  I actually knew I couldn’t do that because—I hadn’t. I hadn’t even exposed myself to one rejection of even one of my books. I had never even mailed a query letter to either an agent or a publisher.

  Heather smiled. “I view it as their loss.”

  “Good attitude.”

  As we walked back to dinner, I thought of my low threshold for rejection and admired her tenacity. But I realized that she didn’t have the mystery writer’s instincts or the skills to be a genre jumper—very few people did. And if they did have the instincts and skills, more often than not, their fans rejected their new-genre books. Many multi-million dollar legal suspense authors publish excellent literary novels that flop because fans just don’t see them that way. This phenomenon is real but unexplained. Evidently, there is not a new fan base to be had under the same name. Some use a nom de plume, but still fail because their nom de plume is back at ground zero with the thousands of new authors at the starting gate. Building a reputation and name recognition is not easy.