Bennis bit her lip. “Are you trying to figure out how long it took Charlie to get from the dining hall to the deck? If you’re going to do that, shouldn’t I slow myself down? He was an old man. I’m a lot faster than he was to begin with, and he was all bent over sick—”
“He was also remarkably fast,” Gregor pointed out. “He was in the bow by the time I got up to the main deck. I didn’t waste much time leaving the mess hall, either.”
“Maybe. But there was the storm. That probably slowed him down, too.”
“Just do what I’m asking you to do, Bennis. It’s not an exact time I need, just an approximation.”
Bennis looked doubtful, but she finally shrugged her shoulders and went back to the mess hall door. Gregor climbed up to the main deck, stepped away from the hatch, and checked his watch. Then he called down, “Now. Go.”
Bennis must have gone. Gregor didn’t hear her in the passage, but he did hear her on the stairs, and he approved. She wasn’t running, but she was keeping up a good forced walk. Her head appeared through the hatch forty-five seconds after Gregor had given her the signal. The rest of her body came on deck less than ten seconds later. “Go to the bow,” Gregor told her, and she went.
The bow was a longer and harder trek than the one from the dining room to the deck above, but even allowing for Charlie Shay’s slower pace and the storm and all the rest of it, there was nothing to disturb the impression he’d had when he’d first come up to the passenger deck after seeing Charlie Shay’s body locked away. If he hadn’t been so caught up in chasing bodies and confronting hostile Bairds and otherwise behaving less like an Armenian-American Hercule Poirot than like an overaged Mannix, he would have seen it sooner.
Bennis came to a stop too close to the bow’s low rail. Gregor shut his watch with a snap and motioned her away from the side.
“Two minutes and fifteen seconds,” he told her. “Make allowances for Charlie Shay and call it three minutes.”
“Three minutes for him to get from the mess hall to here.”
“That’s right.”
“So what?”
Gregor smiled. “So,” he said, “I don’t know what you know about strychnine poisoning, but assuming you know absolutely nothing, I’ll tell you this. Under no circumstances did Charlie Shay make it from the mess hall to here in three minutes flat in the middle of a storm while he was in the grip of strychnine convulsions.”
Bennis stared at him suspiciously. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Do you mean he didn’t die of strychnine poisoning? Do you mean he didn’t die of poisoning at all?”
“Of course I don’t mean that. Charlie Shay definitely died from being fed strychnine. I saw him die. There’s nothing else like it on earth. I’m just saying it wasn’t strychnine that caused him to leave the mess hall when he did. Which, by the way, makes sense. It takes at least five minutes for strychnine to take effect in most people, sometimes longer. Assuming he was fed the strychnine at dinner tonight—”
“Can you assume that?”
“I think so,” Gregor said, “yes. We’ll have to ask, of course, but the only other alternatives leave us with a problem opposite to the one we’ve got now. I mean if somebody fed him strychnine before dinner then he should have begun convulsing at dinner long before he got up and walked out. By then he wouldn’t have been able to get up and walk out.”
“Meaning he must have taken the strychnine in the salad or in the salad dressing,” Bennis said.
“Exactly.” Gregor nodded. “Only Jon Baird handled the salad, but everybody handled the salad dressing, and it was bitter enough to hide anything. What that man thinks he’s doing—”
Bennis sighed. “To tell you the truth, it reminded me of my father. It comes from belonging to Cod House. It’s a men’s cooking club in Philadelphia. Only very old families need apply. They have a positive mania for making things with bitter herbs.”
“I’ll take Lida’s positive mania for making things with chocolate any time you ask. Well. It still doesn’t solve our problem here. Everybody seems to have known about the bitter salad dressing. Jon Baird could have used it to hide the taste of the strychnine, but so could anybody else at that table except you and me. Or maybe I should just say me. You knew all about this—Mackerel House.”
“Cod House,” Bennis said automatically. “Gregor, I don’t understand. If he wasn’t feeling the effects of strychnine, why did Charlie Shay leave the table? Was he just seasick?”