Feast of Murder(56)

“So I’ve been told.”

“So you’re probably wrong,” Tony insisted. “It wasn’t strychnine poisoning. It was some kind of fit.”

Gregor looked back at the bunk. His own bulk was blocking most of the weak light of the candle from reaching Charlie Shay’s face, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been able to look at the body under a Kliegl light. Strychnine poisoning wasn’t like some other things, like arsenic or lye, that left telltale traces long after death. There would be no blue tinge along the jawline or burned patches of skin. A forensic pathologist would be able to find traces in the blood, but all the outward manifestations were limited to the time when the victim was in the process of dying. If you didn’t see those, you had to wait for a coroner’s report. If you did, though, there was nothing else like them on earth.

Gregor retreated to the door, took the candle out of its holder, and gestured to Tony to follow. “I’m not wrong,” he said, “because I saw Charlie Shay die—or immediately after he died—and I know what someone looks like when they’re dying of strychnine. I’m also not wrong because murder is the only thing that makes sense in this case. Don’t you think so?”

“No,” Tony Baird said.

“You’re lying,” Gregor told him. “And you don’t do it very well.”

“You’re obsessed with murder,” Tony said. “You’ve spent so much of your life dealing with it, you’ve started to see it under every bush.”

“Do you really think you’re going to help anyone with this attitude of yours?”

“Do you really think you’re going to help anyone with this attitude of yours?” Tony shot back, and then he moved toward the door, furious and cold, the fine-boned lines of his back almost as rigid as Charlie Shay’s had been in death. “I told my father it was a mistake to invite you here. I told him he’d regret it. I was right.”

Gregor moved away from the door. Tony had it all the way open now. He was presented with a bouquet of faces, looking in expectantly, waiting for something to happen. He turned his shoulder toward them and started to edge through.

“Wait,” Gregor said. “I want to talk to your father. Do you think you could ask him to come in here for me?”

“Do it yourself.”

“I want all these people to get back up into the mess hall as soon as they can,” Gregor went on. “It isn’t good for them to be crowded up out there like that. A couple of them have been sick as dogs since we started out anyway. Tell them I’ll come up and explain the whole thing in a minute or two.”

“You tell them,” Tony said. Then he whirled around, stared at Charlie Shay’s body in the shadows, and whirled back. His face was white. His eyes were red. His jaw was so taut, Gregor thought it was going to snap in two all on its own volition.

“You damned interfering son of a bitch,” he said.

Then he shoved his shoulder into Sheila Callahan Baird’s throat, pushed her aside, and plunged into the passageway, not caring in the least who he had to rearrange to get where he was going.

That, Gregor thought as he watched him leave, is one very ruthless young man.





3


Five minutes later, with the (expected) help of Bennis Hannaford and the (somewhat surprising) help of Fritzie Baird, Gregor had what he’d asked Tony Baird to help him get. The spectators had retreated to the deck above the one where he now stood, probably to crowd together in the mess hall and speculate. Gregor had been present at a number of these mob scenes over the last five years, and in his experience the witnesses liked to talk—to each other. Once the police started to ask questions, some of them inevitably clammed up, but Gregor had never known an innocent witness not to want to talk to other witnesses as long as he thought he wasn’t being overheard. Gregor’s instinct was to let this sort of thing take its course, without interference. Every once in a while there was a case where individual impressions, unfiltered by group consensus, were important. Then you had to divide the witnesses up. The rest of the time, it only helped their memories, and their moods, to let them talk.

The other thing Gregor had wanted, and got, was a private meeting with Jonathan Edgewick Baird. He would have preferred to have had that meeting someplace else besides this small room with Charlie Shay’s body in it, but every time he’d tried to figure out where, the logistics had been too rough. Going to the deck above only invited interruption. At the least, he’d have had Tony Baird hanging over their shoulders, making threatening rumbles in the back of his throat. Going to the main deck wasn’t the answer, either. The storm was dying down by the second, but it was still cold up there, and wet, and every enclosed place had a crew member in it. Gregor supposed there were other empty cabins on this deck, but he didn’t know where they were. It was easier just to stay where he was.