Horacio whipped out a towel and a cape and fastened them both around my neck. “Blimey, I hope you’re not accusing one of us,” he remarked as he tipped the chair back.
I suppose that my timing could have been better, since my head was now tipped back and hanging in the sink, a rather vulnerable position to be in had anyone been inclined to strangle me. Moreover, I’d read articles in medical journals cautioning that older women could easily stroke out with their heads and necks in that position; not that I was particularly old. One shove of the heel of a hand up under my chin could break my neck and sever my spinal cord. Horacio could kill me three different ways without even breaking a sweat.
No, four. He could also drown me in the sink. But I needn’t have worried. Horacio briskly massaged the shampoo into my scalp and showed no inclination to kill me.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Maybe it was someone else hiding in the spa waiting for an opportunity.”
“Whyever would anyone want to hide the head?”
“To keep us from identifying her,” I said. “Whoever killed her expected her head to be crushed in the roof, and it wasn’t.”
“Right. I hear you’re all cozy with Scotland Yard. Do they know who did it?”
“No, not yet.”
Horacio rinsed my hair, wrung it out, wrapped a towel around my head, and brought me upright, all in one fluid motion. “Rumor has it that the captain might have had something to do with it.”
“I‘ve heard that,” I said. “Did you know Leonie well?”
“I did her hair from time to time,” he said while dexterously manipulating comb and scissors. “I suppose I knew her as well as one’s hairdresser knows anybody. We’re like bartenders, you know. People talk to us.”
“So Leonie talked to you,” I said. “About what?”
“Oh,” he waved a hand gracefully, “the odd boyfriend, other people’s love affairs, who said what to whom—you know, the usual.”
“Did she happen to mention that her mother was cruise director on another ship of the line twenty-five years ago?”
Horacio stopped snipping. “She said she was looking for her father. She thought it might be the captain. She said he was on that same ship.”
“Why the captain?” I asked. “Did her mother tell her that? Or tell her grandparents that? I heard that she never told anybody who it was.”
Horacio resumed snipping. “Who told you that?”
Bits of black hair flew everywhere, including into my face. I blew them off as best I could. “Jessica,” I said. “The cruise director. They grew up together, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “So if it wasn’t the captain, who was it?”
“I have no idea. I asked the captain if there were any other officers on this crew that were also on that crew, and he said that as far as he knew, there weren’t.”
Horacio put the scissors down and picked up a hair dryer. “I thought it was the captain, because Leonie spent quite a lot of time talking to him on this cruise. Sometimes she went to his cabin at night after dinner.”
“Wait,” I said. “I thought she came aboard in Grenada. Has she been on this ship all along?”
“Who told you that? She came aboard in Fort Lauderdale. I did her hair before the show that night.”
“Was she having an affair with him?”
Horacio turned the hair dryer on and blew the little bits of hair off my face before turning his attention to my hair. “Crikey, you don’t have to do much with this lot, do you? It’s curling up all by itself.”
“I know. What about the captain?”
He shook his head. “She said they just talked. She was only a tyke when her mother died, and I suppose he could tell her what her mum was like.”
“Do you suppose he was helping her find her father?”
“Could be.” He put the dryer down and removed the cape and towel from around my neck. “There you go. Like it?”
“Love it.” I started to get up out of the chair, but Horacio stopped me. “You know, your hair is a bit dry …”
Here we go again. I held up a hand to stop him. “I do use a conditioner, you know.”
He picked up a tube. “Let me put a bit of this on your hair, just to see if you like it.” He squeezed a small amount into the palm of his hand and used the fingers of his other hand to apply it sparingly to the tips of my curls. “It makes it shiny, see?”
I saw. I liked it. I consented to buy some. I also tipped him generously for spreading the rumor that someone had stolen the head around the crew mess, as I knew he would do.
It wasn’t until I got out to the reception desk that I remembered to ask if they knew how I could get in touch with Officer Dalquist. The receptionist suggested that I go down to the main desk and leave a message. So I did.
After that, I felt at loose ends. Hal and Mum and Nigel wouldn’t be back on board for an hour and a half yet. I was curious to know what Nigel had found out when he called Scotland Yard. I was anxious to talk to Officer Dalquist about how one might dispose of body parts. I needed to talk to someone about how easy or difficult it might be to throw anything, or anybody, overboard. Perhaps I should talk to Officer Grant about that. So I went back to the desk and left a message for Officer Grant, and also for Hal and Nigel to meet me in the Ocean Lounge. Then I reported the theft of my smartphone to the purser.
I still felt antsy. I couldn’t wait to tell Nigel we had to find out about a cruise that took place five years before the Southern Cross, during which Evie Hodges had actually gotten pregnant. He’d probably have to call Scotland Yard again.
Perhaps Jessica might know the name of the ship. If Evie had mentioned if to Maggie … but Maggie had been only four years old when Evie died. Perhaps her grandparents knew. Maybe they’d mentioned it to Maggie when she was older, and maybe she’d mentioned it to Jessica. It was a long shot, but sometimes long shots hit the target. One could hope.
So I went up to the Ocean Lounge and ordered a drink. The bartender was Arturo, who usually worked the Lido bar. “Martini?” he inquired.
I nodded. He prepared it and gave me my glassful of olives without my having to ask for them. I carried my drink over to a table by a window where I could see what was happening on the dock. I grew hypnotized watching crates and crates of supplies being loaded via conveyor belt. It seemed incredible, the amount of food and consumables required to keep twelve hundred passengers plus crew fed and comfortable.
“Toni.”
I turned to see Rob standing by my table.
“Might I join you?” he inquired.
“Of course,” I said, wondering what to expect. Last time I’d talked to Rob, he’d gone stomping off in a rage.
He sat down. Arturo came over, and Rob ordered Scotch on the rocks.
“Are you still mad at me?” I asked.
“Toni, I am so sorry about that. Can you possibly forgive me?”
“If you can forgive me for prying.”
“Oh, well. You have to ask these questions, I suppose, when investigating a murder.”
I offered him an olive. He declined. “I don’t think it would go very well with Scotch, do you?”
As far as I’m concerned, olives go with everything—except maybe ice cream. “What happened to you last night? Weren’t you going to meet us in the infirmary and give us the evidence so we could mail it from San Juan today?”
“I got an emergency call,” he said. “I was told that someone in maintenance had a rather serious injury. When I got there, nobody knew anything about it. I went around the various compartments, asking if anyone was hurt, but nobody knew what I was talking about, and by the time I got back to the infirmary, nobody was there.”
“So it wasn’t you who hit me over the head and knocked me out?”
Rob nearly choked on his Scotch. “God, no! What the bloody hell
are you talking about?”
“And it wasn’t you who put the lady in the cooler and moved the evidence?”
Rob looked narrowly at me. “Are you having me on?”
“The lady was murdered, by the way.”
“What!”
“She had petechiae on her conjunctivae and oral mucosa, and a ligature mark on her neck,” I told him.
“Does the captain know about this?”
“He was there,” I said, “when we found her. I told him she was murdered before I went to find the syringes in the refrigerator and someone knocked me out.”
“Blimey! Who else knows about this?”
“Mum and Nigel,” I said, “and Hal, and the captain and his wife.”
“Dear God,” Rob moaned, “this will never do. I’ve got to see this for myself.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
He didn’t object. We finished off our drinks and headed for the forward elevator. It was like déjà vu all over again as Rob inserted the key in the infirmary door and let us in. We made our way down the corridor to the morgue, Rob unlocked the door, and he and I horsed open the cooler door.
The body was gone.
12
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow ye diet.
—William Gilmore Beymer
“WHAT THE HELL?” I exclaimed.
Mrs. Levine had joined the evidence, my laptop, and my smartphone in the land of the lost. I wondered if the Bermuda Triangle extended this far south.
“There’s got to be a reasonable explanation for this,” Rob said. “I’ll check with the captain.”
“Too bad whoever removed the body couldn’t have put the evidence back,” I grumbled.
“Even if we find it, it’s too late to mail it from San Juan,” Rob said. “We sail in half an hour.”
I hadn’t realized it was so late. “I suppose we could mail it from Fort Lauderdale,” I said.
“It’s a moot point unless we find it,” Rob pointed out.
“Let’s start looking,” I suggested. “It shouldn’t take long with both of us looking.”
“We haven’t got much time,” Rob said. “I’ve office hours at five.”
“Then hadn’t we better get busy?”
We began opening cabinet doors. “Who was she?” Rob asked.
“Her name’s Levine,” I said. “Myra Levine. She sat at our table at dinner a couple of nights ago, and she was on the yacht yesterday in Philipsburg.”
“Oh, you did the yacht race. How was it?”
“Thrilling. Everybody wanted to talk about the murder. Mrs. Levine was spreading the rumor that the captain was the killer because he’d been having an affair with Leonie and had to get rid of her before his wife came on board in Barbados.”
“No wonder somebody killed her,” he said facetiously. “Are we now supposed to think the captain did that as well?”
“There’s a thought,” I said. “Do you suppose that somebody’s trying to frame the captain?”
“Who’d want to do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “but maybe there’s someone who wants to discredit him. Somebody who wants his job, for instance.”
“Well, that would be Dave Lynch,” Rob said, “but it wouldn’t do him any good, because that’s not the way it works. If Captain Sloane loses his job, it would go to the next first officer in line for a promotion. Dave is much too young to be that high on the list.”
“You sound like you know him pretty well,” I commented.
“We grew up together,” Rob said. “I lost touch with him when he went off to maritime college, but since then we’ve been on several of the same cruises—and that reminds me.”
“What?”
“Someone told me awhile back that Dave was in a relationship with Leonie. That’s how she managed to get a job as an entertainer for this cruise line. I heard Dave pulled some strings to make that happen so they could be together.”
“Then it must have pissed him off big-time if he thought she threw him over for the captain after he went to all that trouble to get her a job.”
“So maybe Mrs. Levine knew what she was talking about.”
“And got strangled to shut her up.”
By this time we’d made our way through every possible hiding place in the infirmary. The evidence was nowhere to be found. Admitting defeat, Rob and I went our separate ways—I to the Ocean Lounge, and Rob remaining in the infirmary to prepare for evening office hours.
My husband and my parents were waiting for me in the Ocean Lounge, drinks in front of them.
“So how was it?” I asked.
“Hot,” said Hal succinctly.
“What did you see?” I pursued.
“What didn’t we see,” Mum said. “We started out at the visitor center right off the pier and got these maps and pamphlets, and I think we’ve seen everything on them and then some.”
“We’ve been all around Robin Hood’s barn,” Nigel said. “We’ve left no corner of Old San Juan unturned.”
“We started out with El Castillo San Cristóbal, and then we went to Castillo San Felipe del Morro,” Mum said, mangling the Spanish horribly, “and then we went to the Santa Maria Magdalena cemetery where all the high muckety-mucks are buried, and then …”
“Darling Mum, do you know that your Spanish sucks?” I said.
Mum was unperturbed. “Yes, dear. Then we walked for absolutely miles down this street that runs along the outside of the wall around the city until we got to the city gate.”
“Paseo del Morro,” Hal said. His Spanish was much better. “And then, once we got inside the old city, we saw the governor’s mansion, which was once a fort too, and Ponce de Leon’s house—”
“Ponce de Leon, seriously?” I asked. “The ‘fountain of youth’ guy?”
“He was also the first governor of Puerto Rico,” Hal said. “His house was built in 1521 and is one of the oldest buildings in Puerto Rico. And he’s buried in the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, which was built in 1540.”
“We saw that too,” Mum said.
“Then we walked up and down streets and bought souvenirs and such,” Nigel said, casting a disparaging look upon Mum’s packages. “Fiona had to go into every single shop and browse, and there must be hundreds of them.”
“You exaggerate, dear,” Mum said.
“Some of those shops are so small that there’s only room for one customer at a time, and Hal and I had to wait out in the street,” Nigel went on.
“But the streets are so pretty,” Mum said. “All those colorful houses and blue cobblestones.”
Nigel grunted. “Hard on the feet.”
“I told you we should have used the trolley, love,” Mum said tartly. “It’s free. But you two great boobies had to be macho and walk everywhere.”
I sensed that the conversation was degenerating into a spat and it was time to change the subject, but Hal beat me to it. “In my opinion,” he said, “it’s time to stop talking and do some serious drinking. Where’s that bartender?”
“And by the way, did you get a chance to call Scotland Yard?” I asked Nigel.
“I did,” he said. “Before we went ashore. I talked to an old colleague of mine who’s near retirement himself. He remembered the case. He said he’d get the information and call me back tonight.”
“Tonight?” Mum asked. “What’s the time difference? Won’t that be awfully late for him to be calling?”
“Four hours,” Nigel said, “but tomorrow we’ll be at sea. It’s easier to call ship to shore, and vice versa, while we’re still in port. And speaking of which, what time do we sail?”
“Five thirty,” Hal said, “and it’s four thirty now. You haven’t got much time.”
Arturo came over to the table carrying a tray with our drinks.
“Sorry it took so long. I was on the phone. The purser says the Chief Superintendent has a phone call.”
“Jolly good,” Nigel said. “Thank you, Arturo. Fiona, will you wait until I get back, or should I meet you in our cabin?”
“I think I’ll take these things to our cabin,” Mum said, “and maybe take a shower.”
“We’ll be here,” Hal said.
“Very well,” Nigel said, and he left.
“How’s that for timing?” Hal commented and took a sip of his beer.
“Impeccable,” I said. “And speaking of timing, I found out what happened to Rob last night. Maintenance called him and said they had a badly injured crewman, and when he went there, nobody knew what he was talking about.”
“Of course,” Mum said. “The oft-used bogus phone call, famed in song and story, meant to get someone out of the way for nefarious purposes.”
“Which means,” Hal said, “that it wasn’t necessarily maintenance who called him. I mean, anyone could call and say they were maintenance.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I hadn’t considered that. But it didn’t keep us out of the infirmary. The captain let us in with his keys. So what was the point?”
“Somebody had to get into the infirmary before that to steal the evidence,” Hal said, “and to lie in wait for you. That person had to have keys too.”
“So who else has keys to everything?” I asked. “Besides the captain. Would maintenance have keys to every room on the ship as well?”
“I should think so,” Mum said. “So would housekeeping.”
“They probably have master keys that open all the cabins,” Hal said.
“Well, hell,” I said with disgust. “We’ve just narrowed it down to maybe five hundred crew members. Now what?”
“Did the doctor know anything about the body in the cooler?” Mum asked.
“No, he didn’t,” I said, “and when I told him she’d been murdered, he insisted on going down to the infirmary to see for himself—and she was gone!”
“Gone!” echoed Hal. “How could that happen?”
The Body on the Lido Deck Page 14