Death of an Aegean Queen (23 page)

Heather said, “Exactly when was your husband killed, Mrs. Gaskill? I understand they found a pool of blood on the deck at about three in the morning and it was still liquid.”

We all stared, open-mouthed. For a girl who had been as silent as a Carmelite nun until now, this was quite a debut. Kathryn looked at me, her eyes saying,
You take it from here
.

“It was Kathryn and I who found the pool of blood, in fact. It was sometime after three in the morning, and yes—I suppose it’s all right to say it—the blood was still liquid.”

“So it must have happened between two-thirty and three,” Heather continued, her words now tumbling over each other. “Exposed to the air, the blood wouldn’t have remained liquid for more than a few minutes. I know. I’m a nurse. Blood clots really fast in the presence of oxygen. Otherwise, we’d all bleed to death every time we cut ourselves!”

Kathryn, her mouth tightly shut as if she was about to vomit, got up and, without a word, left the table. I ran after her, dodging around tables and waiters carrying loaded trays, across the dining hall and out through the double doors at the entrance. There I stopped and looked around, but Kathryn had already given me the slip. Perhaps not, I thought. The last time she did this, I’d found her in the bathroom down the hall on the left. She could have gone there again.

I didn’t get the chance to find out, however, because at that moment a hand grabbed me firmly by my elbow and dragged me down the hall to the right. Dragged me toward the display case. It was Sophie Antonakos.

“Dotsy, look! Look at the bracelet. You’ve seen it before, I hope.”

It took me a second to get my bearings. Then I remembered. “Yes. Dr. Girard showed it to me this morning. We talked about how it has no known provenance and, as far as he knows, it’s never been photographed or described.”

“Too late now,” Sophie said. “This is not it. Someone has stolen the real bracelet, the one he showed you this morning, and replaced it with this fake!” Sophie’s dark eyes flashed.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. Look at the workmanship.” The bracelet was a gold spiral that would have wound around the arm twice ending in a serpent’s head on one end, its tail on the other. I couldn’t tell about the workmanship because I’m no expert, but Sophie said, “This spiral is thicker, probably because it’s not solid gold like the real one was. The scales on the snake’s body are different and the carving isn’t nearly as fine. Do you see the stones that are set into the curve of the tail?”

“Yes.”

“They’re green, aren’t they?” Sophie backed up and let me get a closer look at the tail. “This morning, they were blue!”

“Uh, oh.”

“This is probably a copy from a museum gift shop. Some of the copies are quite good, you know.”

“But if the bracelet that was here this morning had never been photographed or described, how could it have been copied?”

“This particular bracelet, as far as we know, had never been described. This
type
of bracelet, with the coils and the snake head and tail, has been found perhaps a dozen times. I’ve seen some, very similar, in the big museum in Athens.”

I looked at the display case on all sides. On one side, between the base and the Plexiglas top, I found a key hole. I ran my fingers around and over it. “I see no damage. It looks as if the thief had no trouble breaking in.”

“Someone had a key,” Sophie said.

“Someone also had a really good substitute handy. This makes no sense. Are we saying the thief is someone on the ship who travels with duplicates of the display case items?”

“I’ll bet you could find something like this in one of the shops in Rhodes. There must be a hundred jewelry shops in Old Rhodes.” She was right. I’d walked past more than a dozen myself today.

“Before we get too upset, Sophie, let’s ask Luc Girard if this is his doing. I know he was concerned about it, and it’s just possible he made the substitution himself. He may have tucked the real one away in the safe.”

Sophie told me she had to dash off and teach a dance class to a group of passengers, explaining that the class wasn’t supposed to run over into the time for the second dinner seating. I checked the bathroom (no Kathryn) and decided to give it up. Kathryn could mull over what Heather had said, alone. I took the stairs down to the promenade deck and slipped out the port side doors. The sweet night air and the lights on the dark water lured me to the rail. Looking up, I found the Big Dipper and, following the pointer stars, the North Star. So we were headed west. Somewhere, over the horizon ahead, was Italy. And Marco. I wondered what he was doing tonight, and if there was any chance he’d come back. One side of my head said,
That’s wishful thinking
. The other side said
, But that Italian temper of his is as volatile as water on a hot griddle. He can get mad in a flash, but he can also get over it in a flash.
Maybe . . .

I tugged at the library door and found it was now locked. Sophie was teaching a dance class and I had no idea where Luc Girard was, but the night was far too beautiful for me to go to my room, so I took the elevator to the top deck, the deck with the observation bar on the bow, the gymnasium in the middle, and the small open deck where I’d first seen Kathryn and Nigel Endicott together, on the stern.

A couple of deck tables were occupied. I found one for myself at the stern rail overlooking the pool three decks below, steeling myself to endure calls of “Marco” and “Polo” from the children I saw cavorting in the water. A waiter appeared out of nowhere and asked me if I wanted a drink.

“Ouzo, please. My room number is three sixty-five.”

As the waiter walked away, I thought:
Who killed George Gaskill?
At this point, the easy answer would be Brittany Benson. She had motive and she had the victim’s watch, but did she have opportunity? I rejected Ollie’s suggestion that Brittany and Sophie might have done it together. I couldn’t believe Sophie would be involved in anything so heinous, but Ollie did have a point. I didn’t know Sophie that well, and innocence could be faked. It’s hard to fool me, though. After raising five children, I’m pretty damn near foolproof. I couldn’t believe Sophie was involved, but she may have gone too far when she gave Brittany an alibi for the entire night. Her roommate could have slipped out when Sophie was asleep and slipped back without awakening her.

But how could Brittany have known where George would be and when? If she had contacted him earlier, letting him know she was on board, would he have consented to a wee-hours meeting? I doubted it. Suppose he’d contacted her? He might, after all, have found out she was on the ship’s staff, contacted her and . . . oh, golly! What if George intended to kill Brittany? He could have rendezvoused with her, or simply bumped into her that early morning, tried to kill her, and Brittany, being younger and more fit than George, could have turned the tables on him. The idea had a certain appeal.

The waiter brought my ouzo and a glass of water. I wished the deck lights were brighter because I love to see ouzo turn blue when you add water to it. I poured about an equal measure of water into the liquor.

Now, what about Malcolm Stone and Willem Leclercq? Like Ollie, they could’ve been angry enough over their poker losses to have followed George, accused him of cheating, and then what? Killed him when he refused to give them their money back? No. The amount they lost, though hefty, didn’t call for such drastic measures. More likely, it would have had something to do with antiquities. Malcolm was an avid collector. He’d obviously been up to something today when I ran into him near the Mosque, and his interest in me might be sincere or it might be a way of finding out what Marco did or didn’t know.

It looked as if Willem Leclercq and Brittany were getting together. Brittany, I knew, was up to her—well, at least her knees—in some sort of funny business with ancient artifacts and Willem was actively seeking the same. Whatever was going on, I knew it had something to do with antiquities. There were too many connections to believe otherwise.

I turned my thoughts to Nigel and Kathryn. What was going on between them? When did they really meet? I’d bet that morning on the deck wasn’t their first meeting. The scene I’d witnessed earlier this evening wasn’t between two people who’d simply shared a table for coffee. To what had Kathryn been referring when she said “It had to be done”? Did she mean George had to be killed? I shivered at the thought.

Did she mean Nikos Papadakos had to be killed? Had Nigel, in fact, been Papadakos’s killer and did Kathryn know all about it? The owner of the shop where the alleged murder weapon had been purchased picked Nigel out, from all the photos he was shown, but had admitted he couldn’t be sure. Kathryn couldn’t have witnessed the murder in Mykonos because she hadn’t set foot off the ship that day.

The waiter dropped by my table and I ordered another ouzo.

I remembered what Marco had said about Papadakos. Everyone on the ship liked him, or so they said, but he was from Crete. Marco seemed to think that fact might be important because Crete was the source of much of the looted antiquities. We’d be docking in Crete tomorrow, near the town of Heraklion. The Palace of Knossos was one of the main reasons I’d wanted to go on this trip, but now I found myself wondering how far Papadakos’s home might be from Heraklion. If it were possible, would it be instructive to drop by and visit? Forget it. I couldn’t talk to them, anyway. I knew the country folk who lived outside the regular tourist spots rarely spoke anything other than Greek.

Nigel Endicott bothered me. He had a British accent but he was from Vermont. No, he’d told me he was retiring to Vermont, but had he told me where he was retiring from? Somehow, I had the impression he was leaving a big city. I needed to look into that. Did Nigel Endicott and Kathryn know each other before this trip? If they did, they’d both lied to me from the beginning.

What motive could Nigel have had for killing Papadakos? I’d originally thought the photographer had been killed because he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. His position at the foot of the gangway at both embarkations and disembarkations made that a likely possibility. But now, I wondered if he, too, mightn’t have been tied up in smuggling.

The waiter walked by and I ordered another ouzo. My third.

Lettie had been sure Nigel’s backpack held something like a bloody shirt, and he was sneaking it off the boat, but it seemed to me it would be simpler to toss it overboard when no one was looking. Why go to the trouble of smuggling it off the ship? I now thought it was more likely the backpack contained stolen artifacts. The bracelet? How would Nigel have managed to get a key to the display case?

If I was on the right track it would mean that, of the men at the poker table the first night, only Ollie Osgood was uninvolved in the antiquities market. Weird. But which of the others were smugglers and which were honest buyers?

My third ouzo having hit my brain, I finally ventured into the thought territory I’d been avoiding. I made myself consider the possibility it was Ollie. Ollie was the last person known to have seen George Gaskill alive. He had motive. Perhaps not a sufficient motive in terms of the amount of money he’d lost to George, but he would’ve also been angry if he thought George had cheated. Where was he at the time of the murder? We had only Lettie’s statement that he was in bed with her, but a wife’s testimony is virtually useless. And the murder could have occurred before he came to their room and went to bed, unless Heather Ziegler was right about the liquidity of the blood pointing to a much later time. Ollie was in the vicinity when Papadakos was killed, but he hardly looked like the man the shop owner thought bought the knife. And how did the Mykonos police know the knife they found was the knife that killed Papadakos? It was found, Marco said, in shallow water, so both blood and fingerprints would have been washed off.

“Another, Madam?”

“Huh?”

“May I bring you another ouzo?”

“No, but I may need help getting back to my room.”

Chapter Twenty-one

I woke up with a thumping headache. My eyeballs shot darts of pain through my head as they scraped against the insides of my eyelids. I couldn’t bear to think of sitting up, so I lay in my bed, swearing never to touch ouzo again.