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Feast of Murder(55)



The maneuver wasn’t aided much by Jon Baird’s taking charge of it—but Jon Baird had taken charge of it, and there was nothing the rest of them could do. Gregor supposed Jon Baird took charge of everything. That was the kind of man he was. Gregor also supposed Jon Baird created a fair amount of resentment in his employees. Now what Jon Baird wanted was Charlie Shay’s body on the lower passenger deck, one flight down from the deck where they were all staying for the holiday. That required the navigation of a second flight of ladderlike stairs and the negotiation of a second set of even tighter passageways. What was worse, the rest of the company insisted on coming along with them, en masse. Gregor had refused to let go of the body. Now they were refusing to let go of it, too. They were refusing to let go of anything.

Going down to this deck, Jon Baird had taken the lead. Now he stopped in front of a narrow door and waited for Gregor and Tony to catch up. Behind Gregor and Tony, the rest of the party was murmuring and coughing and nervous. They had every right to be nervous. Nobody had thought to bring a torch or a tallow candle. It wasn’t absolutely dark down here—nothing outside a scientifically engineered black box, or a deep-earth cavern, is that—but it was close. The darkness made the air seem wetter and clammier and more alive than it was.

“Here we are,” Jon Baird said. “We can put him in here. This is the crew’s deck. They’ll look after him.”

“I don’t want the crew to look after him,” Gregor said. “I want the room locked up.”

“We should have buried him at sea,” Tony Baird said. “That’s what you do in cases like this. It’s going to be days before we reach land.”

“We’ll radio the Coast Guard for help,” Gregor told him.

Tony Baird snorted. “We can’t radio the Coast Guard for help. We don’t have a radio. We don’t have a motor. We don’t have anything. We should have buried him at sea.”

Jon Baird opened the door behind him and peered inside. Then he rummaged around in his pockets and came up with a box of wooden matches. “Just a minute,” he said, “I’ll get things going here. There’s the candle. There we are.”

The candle wasn’t much help, but it was some. Jon Baird placed it in the holder just inside the door he had opened and then edged back out into the passageway to let Gregor and Tony and the body pass. Gregor and Tony edged the body inside and then headed for the only thing they could head for, the small built-in bunk on the far wall. The bunk was even smaller than the ones on the deck above. Gregor didn’t think they were going to be able to get Charlie Shay to lie down flat in it.

They came up to the bunk’s open side, sidled around until they were holding the body with its head where its head was supposed to be, and then began to lower it carefully into position. The legs were stiff, although not as stiff as they would be later, with rigor. Gregor winced a little as they resisted his attempts to bend them. He managed to get them cocked just enough so that the body would fit into the bunk. As soon as he did, he stepped quickly away from the corpse and back toward the center of the cabin.

“Dear God,” Tony said. “He’s stiff as a board. I thought it took hours for rigor mortis to set in.”

“It does,” Gregor told him. “That’s not rigor mortis. That’s a side effect of strychnine poisoning. It’s not a hundred percent sure—”

“Strychnine poisoning?”

“—the stiffening doesn’t occur in all cases and it’s rarely as pronounced as this, although I have seen it this pronounced before. I shouldn’t call it strychnine poisoning, though. I just gave a young man a lecture about that yesterday. Technically, no one gets poisoned with strychnine.”

“Wait a minute,” Tony Baird said, “what are you trying to tell me here? Do you want me to think somebody murdered Charlie Shay?”

“You’ve either got to think that, or you’ve got to think he took strychnine in cocaine like your father’s friend Donald McAdam—”

“Donald McAdam was no friend of anyone on this boat.”

“—and my guess would be that Charlie Shay wasn’t the cocaine type.” Gregor nodded. “Quite frankly, the way he appeared to me was as someone who wasn’t even the cocktail type. A nice, steady, middle-of-the-road gentleman.”

“He was a cipher,” Tony Baird said positively. “Why would anyone want to murder Charlie Shay?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you’re thinking it’s business, you might as well know right up front you’re wrong. Charlie Shay didn’t know shit about the business. I knew more about what went on at Baird Financial, and I didn’t even work there. Charlie’s been a nonperforming partner for years.”