The Body on the Lido Deck

by Jane Bennett Munro

  “I’ll go make my call and meet you there,” Nigel said, “and report the theft of your laptop too.”

  When we got back to our cabin, I took Hal’s advice. I transferred my smartphone from my boat bag to my evening purse, as my dressy dinner clothes didn’t have pockets. Then I thought better of that and stuck it in my bra, trying not to think of the rumors I’d heard that young women were getting breast cancer from doing just that. Just this once, I thought, can’t hurt.

  From the doorway to the dining room, we had a clear view of the captain’s table. His wife was with him, along with First Officer David Lynch, Safety Officer Dalquist, Chief Engineer Gerard, and Rob. Next to Rob was an empty chair. I wondered who it was for.

  Nigel joined us while we were still standing in line to get into the dining room. He was smiling. “Did you get through?” I asked.

  “I did. They want the stuff. The purser will have the containers ready for us shortly. All we have to do is get your young medical friend to let us into the infirmary, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Easier said than done,” I told him. “Rob’s mad at me.”

  “No worries. I’ll talk to him.”

  After we’d been escorted to our table and given our orders to the waiter, Nigel excused himself and went over to the captain’s table, where he sat down next to Rob.

  “What’s going on?” Mum asked. “What are you two hatching now?”

  “Scotland Yard wants the evidence we collected, so we have to pack it up and get it ready to mail from San Juan tomorrow.”

  “Then what, kitten? Will that be the end of it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “Me too,” Hal said, “because I haven’t seen much of you lately.”

  “Sorry, sweetie,” I said. “I miss you too.” I gave him a kiss.

  Nigel came back. “The doctor will meet us in the infirmary after dinner,” he said. “He also wished me to convey his apologies for his earlier outburst.”

  I’d have liked it better if Rob had delivered his apologies in person, but one can’t have everything. “He’s forgiven,” I said. “I should apologize to him for prying into his painful past.” I turned to look and see if I could catch Rob’s eye, but his back was to me, and he didn’t turn around. “I’ll do that later. Although I’m not really sorry I did. We needed that information.”

  “I do hope you aren’t going to tell him that,” Mum said.

  “Not bloody likely,” I said. “Not unless he turns out to be the murderer.”

  Two Canadian couples joined us at that point, so the talk turned to more pleasant topics, such as what everyone had done ashore that day. There was no more talk about murder until Nigel looked over at the captain’s table and noticed that Rob was gone.

  “Now where the bloody hell’s he gone? He was there just a minute ago.”

  “Two possibilities,” I said. “Either he had to go to the little boys’ room, or he’s gone to dispose of the evidence.”

  “What evidence?” asked one of the Canadian men.

  “You really don’t want to know,” my mother assured them.

  “Police business,” Hal added. “He’s Scotland Yard.”

  “What’s Scotland Yard doing here?” the other Canadian man asked.

  “I really can’t talk about it, you know,” Nigel said reprovingly.

  “So,” I put in, “we can either wait for him to get back, or we can go down to the infirmary and catch him in the act.”

  “Or,” Hal said, “you can wait here while Nigel checks the men’s room.”

  “Jolly good,” Nigel said, rising. “Back in a flash.”

  “Look here,” one of the Canadian ladies said, “just what is going on? Has someone been killed on this cruise? Is there a murderer loose on the ship?”

  “Hush,” said her companion. “Keep your voice down. Do you want to start a panic?”

  I looked around. People at some of the other tables were looking at us.

  Hal saw them too. “I think that ship has sailed,” he said.

  “The body of one of the entertainers was found day before yesterday,” I said. “Nigel and I are trying to figure out what happened.”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” said the other Canadian lady hopefully.

  “Maybe,” Mum said, “but my husband and my daughter don’t think so.”

  Nigel came back. “No joy,” he said. “The captain says he went down to the infirmary. Shall we?”

  “Right behind you,” I said.

  But the infirmary, when we got there, was locked, and Rob was nowhere in sight.

  “Now what?” I asked in frustration.

  “Now,” said my stepfather, “we go back upstairs and ask the captain for the key.”

  “You do realize,” I pointed out, “that we’re about to ask one suspect to help us get another suspect to help us get evidence that might convict either one of them of murder.”

  “Either or both,” Nigel said. “They could be in cahoots, as you Yanks say.”

  So we rode the forward elevator back up to the Promenade deck where the main dining room was located. Luckily for us, the captain and his wife were still at their table, enjoying after-dinner liqueurs in tiny glasses. The rest of the officers had left.

  “Chief Superintendent Gray,” Captain Sloane greeted us with a smile, “and Dr. Day. Did you find Dr. Welch?”

  “No,” Nigel said. “He wasn’t there, and the infirmary is locked. We came to see if we could get the key from you and find the evidence ourselves.”

  “I can’t exactly give you the key, you know,” the captain said, “but I can go down with you and help you find what you need. Or I can page the nurse and have her do it.”

  “Oh, don’t you think the fewer people we involve in this, the better?” I appealed to both men.

  “She has a point,” Captain Sloane agreed. “I’ll go down with you after we finish our cordials. Would you care to join us? Allow me to introduce my wife.”

  “Sarah,” said the slim, white-haired woman sitting next to him. She reached out to shake my hand. “Please join us. And perhaps your mother and husband would care to join us also?”

  I looked over at our table. The Canadians had already left, and Mum and Hal were just pushing their chairs back to get up and leave. I waved at them, and they came over. I made introductions all around. A waiter materialized, and the captain ordered cordials for everybody.

  Apparently we were going to have to wait. The captain and his wife weren’t going to budge until they were good and ready, and the urgency I felt was of no consequence. I was sure they thought I was overreacting, much like my loving but long-suffering husband.

  So I sipped my cordial and otherwise kept my mouth shut. At least I did until Sarah Sloane turned to me and asked me what kind of a doctor I was and what this was all about. Obviously, her husband had told her nothing.

  I hesitated, and she noticed. “It’s quite all right,” she added. “I want to hear all the details. Leave nothing out.”

  The captain and Nigel were deep in conversation. So I began to tell her all about the body crushed in the roof and the head in the swimming pool, when my mother intervened.

  “Antoinette, darling, really. Must we have corpses with our cordials?”

  “Antoinette?” Sarah inquired with amusement. “Your name is really Antoinette?”

  “Yes, more’s the pity,” I replied with a withering glance at Mum. “Nobody gets to call me that except Mum. Everybody else calls me Toni.”

  “I see. And do you have a middle name?”

  “Yes, it’s Ivy.”

  “After my grandmother,” Mum said. “She never uses it, though.”

  “You know why as well as I do, Mum. If I use all my names, my initials spell AIDS.”

  “Oh dear,” Sa
rah remarked. “That would never do. So, about this body. What happened next?”

  Cleaning up the narrative for my mother’s sake, I told Sarah about the coroner, losing the head, finding the head, the autopsy of same, and the gathering of evidence. “That,” I told her, “is what Scotland Yard wants us to send them. Dr. Welch put it away for safekeeping in the infirmary, and now we can’t find him, so your husband is going to let us in with his key so we can find it. We have to mail it from San Juan tomorrow.”

  “It appears,” Sarah said, “that our young doctor is behaving somewhat suspiciously. Do you suppose he knows more than he’s saying about this dreadful affair?”

  “He’s said plenty,” I told her. “Apparently he knew the victim from his college days. They were engaged to be married, and she broke it off just before graduation. She wouldn’t tell him why.”

  “I’m surprised that he would tell you that,” Sarah said. “Men, in my experience, don’t like to talk about affairs of the heart, especially if they end badly.”

  “He didn’t do it willingly,” Hal put in. “Toni bullied it out of him.”

  “I didn’t bully anybody,” I objected. “He got upset when I asked him why. Apparently he kept track of where she was and what she was doing and made several attempts to contact her after they graduated and he went to medical school. She refused to talk to him.”

  “Antoinette,” said Mum, “doesn’t this story remind you of Robbie?”

  “Oh jeez. You would have to bring him up.”

  “Who’s Robbie?” asked Sarah.

  “An old boyfriend,” Hal said, “who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “A most unsavory young man,” Mum said severely, “who beat her up and then raped her, and then he almost killed Hal.”

  “My goodness gracious,” Sarah said, shocked. “When did this happen?”

  “We dated in high school,” I said, “and then he went away to college. We got together whenever he was home, though, and he wanted to marry me, but Mum didn’t want me to.”

  “I certainly didn’t,” Mum said firmly. “She was all ready to marry that boy right after graduation and work to put him through law school so he could just drop her like a hot potato and marry a trophy wife. Not if I could help it, she wasn’t!”

  “He kept calling me after we broke up.”

  “After he raped you, you mean,” Mum interrupted. “He also kept calling me, and I wouldn’t tell him where she was.”

  “Neither would I,” I said, “and after Hal and I moved to Idaho, we kind of forgot about him.”

  “Until he found her,” Hal said. “He came up to Idaho to visit a lawyer friend, and while he was there, he threatened to kill me so he could have Toni.”

  “Then he kidnapped Hal and tied him up in a crawl space where he nearly froze to death,” I began.

  “And I got hantavirus pneumonia and almost died,” Hal said.

  “My God,” Sarah exclaimed. “Where is he now?”

  “In prison,” I said.

  “Thank heavens,” Sarah said. “What a horrible story!”

  “It was that old ‘if I can’t have her nobody else can either’ scenario,” Hal said. “Do you suppose that’s what happened between our murder victim and our doctor?”

  I shivered. “We can’t rule it out,” I said.

  “That settles it,” Hal declared. “You and Nigel aren’t going down to that infirmary by yourselves.”

  “We won’t be by ourselves,” I objected. “The captain will be there too.”

  Silence ensued. I looked at Mum, then at Hal, and they stared back implacably. Nobody wanted to mention that the captain was a suspect too, not in front of his wife.

  “We’ll all go,” Sarah said. “He can’t kill all of us, now, can he?”

  Not unless he has a gun, I thought, recalling last year when a serial killer was trying to drown me in a canal, and Hal, Nigel, my son-in-law Pete, and the sheriff had ridden to the rescue, all armed with guns.

  “Now then,” said the captain, startling me, “shall we?”

  We all got up and followed Captain Sloane to the elevator. As we stood there waiting, he looked around at all of us. “You’re not all going, you know. Just Chief Superintendent Gray and Dr. Day.”

  “Not on your life,” Hal said. “The man is dangerous. We’re not letting you go without us. Don’t you have a gun?”

  The elevator doors opened, and we all got in. Captain Sloane looked at his wife as he pressed the button for A Deck. “Sarah? Are you responsible for this?”

  “Yes, dear. We’ve been having quite the conversation, and I think Dr. Shapiro is absolutely right.”

  “You can’t very well stop them, you know,” Nigel said to the captain.

  “You do realize, don’t you, that on this ship, I am the law?”

  “Sometimes,” Nigel said, “the law needs a little help. Speaking for Scotland Yard, I say you shouldn’t turn it down.”

  The captain sighed. “Very well, then, since you’re all here. Stay behind me, and do exactly what I say. Is that clear?”

  We all assented.

  When we arrived at the clinic, the doors were still locked. Captain Sloane knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. When there was still no response, he inserted his key in the lock and opened the door. Hal, Nigel, and I flattened ourselves on the walls to either side of it as we’d seen so many cops do on TV so as not to get shot through it, but nothing happened. The captain turned on the lights. “Lead the way, Dr. Day,” he said to me.

  “It’s in the morgue,” I said, opening the door into the corridor. When we reached it, I found the door to be locked. I turned to the captain. “Now what?”

  “No worries,” he said, pulling out his keys.

  After the captain unlocked the door, I turned on the light. “Here’s the cooler,” I said. “We put the stuff in here. I may need a little help with this. It sticks.”

  It took all three men to wrench the door open. When they did, everybody gasped.

  The evidence was gone, but the cooler wasn’t empty. It had acquired a new occupant. A stout lady in a long floral dress and a cardigan.

  “Who the devil’s that?” Nigel demanded.

  “She’s a passenger,” Captain Sloane said, “but I don’t know her name. I’ll have to check the passenger list. Do you know her, Dr. Day?”

  “She sat with us at dinner one night,” I said, “Jessica said her name was Levine.”

  “I know who she is,” Mum said. “She’s that awful woman who gossiped about everybody she’d had dinner with and had nothing good to say about anyone. You remember, Antoinette. She badgered you with questions about autopsies and accused you of taking money to cover things up.”

  “Blimey,” Nigel commented, “who could forget that?”

  I took a closer look at Mrs. Levine’s face. It was puffy, and her lips were blue. I lifted an eyelid. There were tiny red spots on her conjunctiva. “Nigel,” I said, “could you hold her eyelids apart for me?”

  Nigel complied. I pulled my smartphone out of my bra and snapped a picture. Next I pulled down on her lower lip and saw more little red spots. The tip of her tongue protruded between her teeth and was also blue. I took more pictures.

  “I assume there’s no truth to that, Dr. Day,” Captain Sloane said. “What are you doing?”

  “Examining the body.” Mrs. Levine’s neck was short and thick, but I pulled the folds apart and saw a ligature mark. I called upon Nigel again and took a picture of it. “Look at these marks,” I said to him. “This was a wide ligature, and it looks woven.”

  “I see that,” Nigel commented. “She’s still warm too. She can’t have been here long.”

  “She can’t have been dead long either,” I said, manipulating an arm. “There’s no rigor.”

  “There was that CEO, remembe
r?” Mum said. “You did an autopsy on him, and there was this doctor who kept threatening you if you put something in the autopsy report. I forget what.”

  I remembered that case only too well. “He’d had a heart attack,” I said, “and the intern in CCU started a central line in the subclavian vein and neglected to get a chest X-ray afterward. As it turned out, he’d punctured a lung, and the resulting pneumothorax contributed to the patient’s death. It didn’t help that the intern’s father was on the medical staff.”

  “Ah,” Nigel said. “He was trying to protect his son. What did you do?”

  “What anyone would have done,” I said. “There were other people in the room with me when I found that. No point in trying to cover it up. Not that I would have done so in any case.”

  “What happened?” asked Captain Sloane, interested in spite of himself.

  “The family sued the hospital. It was a big mess.”

  “What about the intern?” asked Sarah Sloane.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It was a hard lesson to learn, but we all have them. Usually they’re not this harsh. He was raked over the coals by the Morbidity and Mortality Committee, the Credentials Committee, and the California State Board of Medicine, but he was allowed to complete his internship and go on to a surgical residency.”

  “What happened to his father?” asked the captain.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Didn’t you complain?” Mum asked. “I seem to remember—”

  “I was a resident at the time, and I reported his threats to the Chairman of Medical Education. Nothing happened.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Sarah Sloane commented.

  “It wasn’t,” I said, “but it was another lesson learned.”

  “Not to cut the story short,” Nigel said, “but where’s the evidence?”

  “Rob did tell me,” I said, “that he’d have to move it if he needed the cooler for a body, so it could be anywhere. Maybe it’s in those cabinets.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asked Captain Sloane.

  “A big glass jar,” I replied, describing the approximate dimension with my hands, “a bucket, a urine cup with a splinter in it, another urine cup with hair in it, and two glass syringes, and I know where those are. I’ll go get them. Oh, and by the way, this lady was murdered.”