“He might have been. I don’t think so, though. If you were going to kill someone with strychnine, would you really want to sit around and watch him die all over your dinner table?”
“I wouldn’t want to kill anyone with strychnine.”
“Good point.” Gregor sighed. “My point is that I think Charlie Shay’s seasickness got a little help from whoever murdered him. Do you know what ipecac is?”
“Sure. It’s the stuff your mother gives you when you’ve just eaten every last one of a new bottle of St. Joseph’s children’s medicine because they’re flavored with orange and you think they’re candy. It makes you throw up.”
“Perfect. The times are right, too, you know. Put the ipecac and the strychnine together. The ipecac would work first—”
“Wait, wouldn’t it make you throw up and get rid of all the strychnine?”
“Depends on how much was used. If you gave a small enough dose of ipecac and a large enough dose of strychnine, your victim would be just as dead as if he’d had strychnine alone.”
“And you could do that because you didn’t really want him to throw up,” Bennis said, “you just wanted him to get out of the mess hall and do his dying somewhere else.”
“Preferably on this deck just about where you’re standing,” Gregor said.
“You mean preferably where he’d be likely to fall overboard,” Bennis said. She walked to the bow’s low rail and looked out over the water, shivering. “This is really nasty, isn’t it, Gregor? Really sly. Do you think you’ll find out who did it?”
“Oh, I already know who did it,” Gregor said. “That’s hardly the problem here. Don’t you think it’s about time we went back inside?”
“Below,” Bennis said reflexively, and then she gave him a hard, long stare. Gregor grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the hatch. She’d given him that stare before. It was the one she used to let him know she thought he was keeping her out of something. He couldn’t help it.
Besides, everything he’d told her was true.
He did know who did it.
He just had a few details he had to clear up.
2
Innocent bystanders in a murder case always become sightseers, unless they have actually witnessed a bloody and terrifying death. Gregor had never known a case of poisoning where the people on the edges hadn’t been possessed more by curiosity than by horror. Since that was often true of the murderer, too, Gregor expected to have no trouble questioning most of the people he wanted to question. They wouldn’t care if he was “official” or not. They had either heard of him before they ever came on this boat—Gregor was perpetually astounded these days by just how many people had heard of him—or they had been filled in by Tony Baird as Bennis had said they had. They’d have a hesitation or two at the very beginning, but in the end they would succumb. They’d think it was just as thrilling as if they’d landed in the middle of a novel by Ellery Queen.
Opening the door to the mess hall, Gregor was struck by how true these observations had become. He’d first made them when he was a very new agent and assigned to kidnapping detail, and they’d been true then, God only knew how many presidents ago. Lately they’d become even truer yet, as if people had moved off a mark someplace, away from action and into a firmly fixed spectator role. Maybe it was all the cop shows on television or the murder mysteries in the bookstores or something Terribly Significant and Part of the National Subconscious like the aftermath of the Vietnam War. That was the kind of explanations “professionals” gave, and that Gregor had no use for. More likely, it was just plain human nature, seen more clearly in the raw than it once had been. Whatever it was, it suited Gregor’s purpose very well. Spectators were never mere spectators. They were always reviewers as well. They liked to talk.
Gregor looked in on them all arrayed before him around the table—a table that had been meticulously cleared of dinner things and wiped down, so that now it was empty of everything except Fritzie’s line of mason jars filled with pumpkin rind marmalade. Bennis came up behind him, ducked under his arm, and went inside, but they hardly paid attention to her. They were too busy looking Gregor up and down and back and forth as if he were about to sprout antennae. He looked them over as well, counting. Jon Baird was gone, of course. Gregor hadn’t expected to see him. Someone else was gone as well.
“My wife went back to our cabin,” Mark Anderwahl said suddenly, and guiltily, as if he were reading Gregor’s mind. “She was really very ill. Very ill. She was green.”