Killer Cruise

by A. R. Winters

  “Really?” I said again, even more skeptically.

  “Of course. You promised that you were going to keep me fully informed of your investigations. I assumed you understood that to mean I expected to see you at least daily, if not more frequently if you uncovered anything interesting.”

  “Oh... right, yeah. Of course.” He was right, darn it. I had promised to keep him up to speed in my investigations. I hate it when other people are right. His confession may not have been all that exciting, but it had made me feel a bit better.

  He pressed the lion’s head doorbell again and we could hear the loud ding-dong from inside.

  Finally, the door opened and a spritely-looking brown-haired man in his early sixties greeted us with a look of mild surprise, his eyes running over Ethan Lee’s uniform and noticing his rank.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure...?”

  “Could we come inside and ask you a few questions?”

  He nodded. “Please, follow me.”

  He looked to be in much better health than Patrick Murphy had been, and I would have wagered that he was a regular runner or swimmer from his build. As we followed him, he walked with a slight swagger that oozed strength and confidence.

  He led us over to a dining table near the french windows, and we took three of the six art deco style chairs and sat around the table.

  “I suppose you’re here about Patrick Murphy, my former business partner?”

  “Former?” I asked with a frown.

  “Well, he’s dead,” said Carl with a wry smile.

  “Mr. Turner—”

  “—Please, call me Carl.”

  “Carl,” said Ethan, “were you traveling with Mr. Murphy?”

  He shook his head with a little smile. “Oh, no. Would you believe it was a complete coincidence?”

  No, I said in my head. “How unlikely!” I said out loud.

  “Oh it is, isn’t it? What are the odds?”

  “Very low, I should think,” said Ethan with a frown.

  Carl chuckled. “Indeed you would think. But it’s not so strange, really. We both very much like cruising, and we both favor Swan over some of the other companies—I find you treat me very well indeed. So it’s no surprise that occasionally we end up on the same trip.”

  “It’s happened before?” I asked, with surprise.

  “Oh yes, at least three times that I recall. Once out of Miami, once in Alaska, and now out of New Orleans too!”

  I nodded. It was interesting information. But what was especially interesting was that Swan didn’t do any Alaska cruises. Though he hadn’t actually said it was Swan on that occasion.

  “Mrs. Murphy seemed quite surprised to find out you were on the ship,” I said.

  “Janice has nothing to do with this,” he said firmly. His tone was noticeably cooler.

  “With what?” I asked innocently.

  “With… with… you know. Whatever has happened.” He seemed to be growing more and more flustered.

  “Mrs. Murphy said that you’d followed them.” I didn’t want to tell him the truth—that she had said he was like a stalker—because that language wasn’t diplomatic enough. At least not in front of the first officer.

  “I can assure you that’s not the case. Janice just has her wires crossed, that’s all. She didn’t mean anything by it, I’m sure.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that at all.”

  Carl had his hands in front of him, wringing them together every time he spoke, the two hands sliding like intertwining snakes as they wrapped over and over each other.

  “I don’t think I can help you with anything, to be honest.”

  “Just out of interest, what were you up to on that first night? You were one of the early boarders too, is that correct?” Ethan’s tone was mild but I could tell his hackles were up.

  “I was in my cabin. In here, I mean. I had a quiet evening. Before dinner, I went for a run. I did three circuits of the ship, then I had a light dinner delivered to the room and I spent the evening in my cabin. I watched the sunset, then I did some reading.”

  “That sounds nice and relaxing,” I said with a smile.

  He returned my smile with one of his own, beginning to let his guard down again. “It was. That’s why I come on cruises, to relax. I switch off my phone and don’t even check my email for the entirety of the cruise. It’s a fantastic way to unwind from all the stress of the modern world.”

  “Thank you very much for your time, Carl,” said Ethan, rising to his feet and gently nudging my thigh to tell me to follow.

  I would have liked to have grilled him a bit more, but even I was aware of the need for sensitivity with the VIP guests.

  Carl was definitely hiding something. He’d immediately gone on the defensive when I brought up the topic of Mrs. Murphy and his alibi was basically non-existent. Unless he’d ordered room service every ten minutes, there was nothing to say that he had spent all, or indeed any, of the evening in his cabin.

  “Enjoy the rest of your afternoon, Mr. Turner,” I said with a smile as we left.

  Ethan Lee held the door open for me, and gently guided me out, his hand again gently guiding me by pressing my lower back.

  He was actually quite a gentleman, I thought. When he wasn’t busy playing prison guard to my friend, anyway.

  Chapter 23

  We walked out onto the constitutional deck, not speaking until our voices were covered by the sounds of the wind and waves, away from the echoey hallways of the ship that could send voices bouncing around corners toward distant listening ears.

  “What did you think of him?” he asked, when we were outside.

  “Not bad for his age,” I said with a grin.

  “I didn’t mean... oh, haha.”

  “But he’s obviously lying about something. There’s something between Janice Murphy and him that he doesn’t want to tell us.”

  Ethan was in agreement. “He got flustered as soon as we mentioned her.”

  “And Janice has been saying that he’s a stalker, that he followed them onto the ship. And his alibi is non-existent.”

  Ethan was looking out to sea, holding the railing with two hands. Instead of the ocean, my eye was drawn to the square outline of his shoulders. He turned his head toward me to ask another question. “Do you think he killed Murphy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe? The thing is... he just seemed too nice, you know?”

  His left hand dropped from the railing and he turned his whole body my way. “Perhaps he was just pretending to be nice.”

  “Could be.”

  “I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes, I’m afraid. If you think of anything else, we’ll reconvene ASAP. Okay?”

  His eyes had a sincerity to them that made me think he might actually be keen on the reconvening itself, rather than the prospect of more information about the crime.

  “Will do. I’ve got plenty to do as well. Have a good one.”

  He waved a hand at me as he turned smartly and headed back in the ship. I watched him go, once again admiring how well his uniform fit him—from this angle, it was the way the pants hugged his lower half that really stood out.

  I needed to do some more work. I had an idea for a little article about how to bend cocktail straws—I’d noticed that the bartenders used different shapes for a gin and tonic as they did for a fruity cocktail, for example—and I wanted to dig into it. If ‘dig’ is the appropriate term for what would be a four-paragraph cotton-candy piece of journalism. I patted my sides and then grimaced with annoyance.

  “Oh... cornstalks,” I muttered under my breath. Once upon a time, when I was a teenager, I’d tried using more colorful words— but Grandma quickly put a stop to that.

  The reason for my sudden consternation was that I had misplaced my laptop. Instead of hanging in its bag from my shoulder, it was now glaringly conspicuous by its absence.

  “Call yourself a journalist?” I said to myself in a hushed v
oice. The computer was the tool of my trade and I’d gone and left it in Carl’s cabin.

  I hurried back to his suite as quickly as I could. It was just shy of a half-hour since we’d left him, and when I rang his doorbell I was hopping nervously from foot to foot. Please be in, please be in.

  Luckily, he hadn’t. I heard the footsteps on the other side of the door, and as soon as it began to swing open I began to speak before I could even see him.

  “Hi, just me again. I think I left my laptop on your... table?”

  By the time I got to ‘your,’ the door was completely open and I’d paused upon seeing Carl. While he had been immaculately dressed a scant half hour earlier, he was now looking really disheveled, as if he’d spent the intervening period in jiu-jitsu training or being beaten up in a street brawl. I didn’t think either of those activities were common in our VIP suites so I was both confused and intrigued by the sudden change in his appearance.

  His lips caught my eye. Not only were they pleasingly plump without being fat, they seemed to have taken on a remarkable shade of red—some of which was smeared onto his upper lip in a kind of scary-clownish mustache.

  “Ah. One moment.”

  He turned to hurry to the table by the window where I could clearly see my laptop still sitting. But while he was over there, another flutter of movement caught my eye.

  Someone peeked their head around the corner leading from the bedroom. And it was someone I knew.

  Janice Murphy, the victim’s wife, was in the cabin of the man she had accused of being a stalker!

  She pulled her head back sharply when she saw me standing there and disappeared. A moment later, my computer was being thrust against my chest with enough force that I took a step backward as I grabbed it with my hands.

  “There you go—goodbye!”

  The door closed in my face; if those quiet-hinge doors could slam, it absolutely would have knocked me flat. The entire interaction had taken only a dozen seconds, yet I now had some interesting new information.

  Very interesting, indeed.

  It looked to me like Janice had been faking her animosity toward Carl. They looked to be quite intimate in fact.

  Had they been working together all along? Were Janice and Carl a murderous double-threat of lovers and killers?

  “Boy, I wish I could write an expose about that,” I muttered to myself. I started to imagine how I would label such a story, and Sylvia’s reaction if I posted it.

  #doubletrouble, #killercruise...

  Chapter 24

  As soon as I’d seen Janice in the stateroom, I wanted to rush and tell Ethan about it right away. So I did.

  Of course, he wasn’t in his office, and I remembered why at the same time as his orderly told me.

  “Sorry, ma’am. He’s in a meeting with the engine room crew, and then he has two more back-to-back. That takes him right up to the end of his scheduled shift. He’ll be in the office first thing tomorrow though. Do you want me to pencil you in?”

  I shook my head. “What time does his shift end?”

  “He’s on office hours today.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. That’s a nine-to-five. That’s what we call it here, an office hours shift.”

  “I see. And he’ll be going to his cabin right after?”

  “Ma’am, I do not know what the first officer does in his free time.”

  “Of course. My apologies. And his cabin is...”

  The orderly stared at me for longer than was seemly before he finally replied.

  “Ma’am, the first officer’s cabin is in the officers’ quarters section of the ship.”

  Of course it was. And I even knew where it was, although I had not yet ventured there.

  “Thanks for all your help.”

  I had several hours to kill so I tried to get ahead with my work, but my mind kept returning to that image of Janice, her makeup smeared, poking her head around and seeing me in Carl’s cabin.

  All I managed to get done was the consumption of three cups of coffee and a one paragraph article—though when they’re that short, they should probably just be called a ‘caption’—about the different kinds of massage available in the beauty parlor, underneath a photo of a massage table I had taken on my first work day.

  I waited until five thirty before going to Ethan’s cabin. I didn’t want to seem too eager. But it turned out my timing couldn’t have been worse. Or “worse,” anyway.

  I rang at his door, and when he didn’t answer it immediately, I rang it again.

  Finally, after making me wait almost a minute, he deigned to open it, and my mouth dropped open and my cheeks began to bloom like a rose.

  “Oh, sorry! Sorry!”

  He had been taking a shower when I rang the doorbell, and after my repeated ringing he’d barely had time to wrap a towel around his waist before greeting me at the door.

  I tried to look in his eyes instead of... elsewhere.

  “Adrienne,” he said with a smile, not seeming to be the slightest bit embarrassed about his state of undress.

  “Sorry!” I said again.

  “No problem. You suggested I try losing the uniform anyway, didn’t you?”

  Was he trying to embarrass me? My eyes flicked over his muscular torso, completely of their own accord. I made a mental note to jab my finger in my eyes later to punish them for their indiscretion.

  “I, yeah,” I laughed a bit too loudly. “I just found something out. Umm, when you have a moment.”

  “Well, come in, and I’ll get dressed and we can talk.”

  “Yes. Yes let’s do that.”

  His cabin was about a hundred times bigger than mine and so many different luxuries: six porthole-style windows, a wooden dining table with eight chairs, a sofa, and a real wooden desk instead of the metal wall-attached one I had. Instead of smelling of steel and industrially-washed sheets like my room, there was a hint of pinewood in the air, and of course the smell of shampoo from his still wet hair.

  I decided to sit on the sofa while I waited for him. I tapped my foot nervously until he returned.

  When he came back, he was wearing corduroy pants and a short-sleeved button-up shirt that fit him just as well as his uniform. Unlike a lot of men, he chose clothes that were both the correct size, and they suited his rather eye-catching frame.

  He sat down next to me on the sofa and we turned to face each other to talk. I wished I’d sat at the dining table instead. There’s something overly intimate about sitting next to someone you don’t know that well on a sofa—having to turn to face them to speak. Especially when you’d just seen them almost naked.

  “So what’s up?”

  “It’s Janice. And Carl.”

  “Oh?” He extended his legs out all the way in front of him in a stretch, clearly ready to relax after his workday. Instead, he was having to deal with me and the extra work I was going to put on him.

  “I left my computer in Carl’s room, and when I went back to get it, she was there.”

  “Janice was in his room? Was she yelling at him?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. If I had to guess, it was exactly the opposite. It looked like they were being quite affectionate with each other.”

  “Oh?”

  “Carl had lipstick on his face.”

  “He put on lipstick?”

  I frowned. Why was he so slow? “No, I mean, she was wearing lipstick and some of it ended up on his lips.”

  “Oh. Oh,” he said finally. “Wait, really? But she was complaining about him. I thought she hated him.”

  “Love and hate can sometimes be confused.”

  Our eyes met. “Is that right?”

  “Mmhmm,” I mumbled. “Or maybe it was just an act. She was lying about hating him because actually she was having an affair with him? And she wanted to throw us off the trail?”

  He nodded slowly. “So. What do we do?”

  A surge of pride welled inside me. The first officer of the ship was asking me
for advice. Little old me!

  “You said you saw her on the security footage that night, right?”

  He nodded. “Yep. She almost fell in the fountain that’s in the atrium outside the Dive Bar, around about 11 p.m.”

  I nodded. “What about the rest of the evening? Perhaps she could have slipped out at another time?”

  He slowly nodded. “I guess that’s a possibility. We didn’t try and follow every second of her movements. We were just trying to confirm her alibi when we looked into it before.”

  “Can we still check those security feeds?”

  He frowned for a second and then gave a quick nod. “Come on. We’ll go to my office. I can access all the security footage from my computer there.”

  Ten minutes later, we’d completed the short journey to his office.

  “Good evening, sir. Is anything the matter?” asked the young orderly stationed outside.

  He shook his head. “No. The social media manager is just doing a little piece on me.”

  When we entered, I poked his arm. “You lied to him.”

  He gave me a grin. “Nope. The thing is, rumors spread fast on ships. Really fast. I’m sure he wouldn’t tell anyone, but I didn’t want to risk it.”

  “You still lied though.”

  “Oh, no. Adrienne James, as first officer of this ship, I command you to take a picture and write something nice about me.”

  I snickered. “You’re commanding me, huh?”

  He nodded seriously. “That’s an order.”

  I stepped back from him and began to hold up my phone, and then dropped it again. “I’ll wait until you’re back in your uniform. Otherwise people might get the wrong idea about us—socializing outside of work.”

  “The wrong idea?” He tapped his chin. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

  We grinned at each other.

  “Shall we?” He pointed toward the computer, which was located at a less formal desk in the far corner of the room, next to the window.

  He pulled up an extra chair for me, and then began a rapid series of clicks with the mouse which pulled up a giant grid of camera feeds.