Feast of Murder(58)

“I’ll be along in a minute.”

“I’ll send First Mate Debrek along to make sure this room is locked. I’ll have him give you the key, if you want it that way.”

“I do want it that way.”

“I thought you would. You know, Mr. Demarkian, you really ought to be careful. I made a mistake having you here when you refused to take my money. I don’t like the kind of leverage you have when you’re not in my employ. You can make a few mistakes yourself, if you’re not careful.”

“But I’m always careful,” Gregor said.

Jon Baird stepped out into the passage and shook his head. In the darkness there, he looked like an evil spirit, with the power to disappear. Seconds later, he was gone.

Gregor went back to the bunk and looked down at the face of Charlie Shay. He would stay here and wait for the first mate to lock up. He thought it was crucial. He had expected disbelief when he announced his judgment on the cause of Charlie Shay’s death. It was a judgment hard to credit, in view of Charlie Shay’s life. What he hadn’t expected was this—this meretricious horse manure.

Gregor Demarkian knew that Charlie Shay had died from taking strychnine because he had seen enough of death from strychnine to know what he was talking about. He didn’t expect to be believed. The problem was, he had been believed, instantaneously, by both Tony Baird and Tony’s father. Their protests were not based on doubt but on plausibility, like the protests of a man who has committed the crime he has been accused of but knows it cannot be proved against him. That led to a couple of interesting conclusions, including the one that said that in that case, either Tony or Jon or the two of them together had murdered Charlie Shay. And the problem with that was—

Gregor went to the door of the cabin, looked out, and sighed. He wished the first mate were already on the premises. He wished there were electric lights on this boat. He wished he didn’t have to go up and spend the rest of his night questioning people who were going to think, quite rightly, that he had no business asking them anything at all.

He also wished he knew what was going on. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the situation was still lethal.





Two


1


IT TOOK NEARLY HALF an hour for First Mate Debrek to arrive at the cabin where Gregor Demarkian was keeping watch over Charlie Shay’s corpse, and when he did Gregor had to give up his last hope that some sort of sensible procedure could be established for this crime. Gregor had never really believed in the legends of men so powerful that no one around them was willing to risk their wrath for any reason whatsoever. There might have been men like that in the small Communist bloc countries before the fall of the Soviet union  , but this was America. Even J. Edgar Hoover, with his paranoia and his illegal files, had been able to go only so far, and then only against men willing to be blackmailed to keep their careers. Quite a few other men had simply told him where to put it—and got away with it, too, because if The Boss had ever tipped his hand about those files, he would have been politically dead meat. Surely Jon Baird’s crew wouldn’t be willing to sail up the Atlantic coast with the body of a possible murder victim locked into a cabin on their own deck, arousing the wrath of police departments in four or five states and the FBI and the Coast Guard just to keep the old man happy. Gregor wasn’t sure who had jurisdiction here—and, he had noticed, neither was Jon Baird—but somebody did, and a few other somebodies were going to want it. It had to be simple to convince the crew that it would be in their own best interests to ignore their orders and head immediately for land.

It might have been simple indeed, but Gregor never got the chance to find out. He waited patiently until the small, spare man came down with his candle. He stood in the passageway while the door was locked and the key handed over. Then he said a perfectly pleasant “Good evening,” and was met by a blank stare.

“Damn,” Gregor said. “Don’t you speak English?” Debrek said something that sounded like “Betzhitzi dem bournidin” and turned his back. Gregor winced. He knew Armenian when he heard it—he couldn’t help it—and French and German as well, but this was something convoluted and obscure. He had a terrible feeling that Jon Baird had taken on a few refugees of his own. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine—over the last six months, Baird could have picked up a few men from any of those places, and they would be perfectly safe from the importunings of friends and enemies alike. Gregor knew more than most people about refugees. He knew that if Debrek knew that what his employer was asking him to do might jeopardize his chances for a green card or a set of naturalization papers, he would abandon it as soon as he possibly could. The only problem was in getting Debrek to understand that what he was engaged in was illegal. Gregor gave it a second try. “I would like to talk to you,” he said, in a very hopeful voice. It did no good. At the sound of talking, Debrek turned and waited politely. It was the attentiveness of manners, not comprehension. When the talking was done, Debrek turned again and hurried off, toward the narrow staircase to the deck above. Gregor followed him. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.