Feast of Murder(78)

“There was no radio,” Tony said.

Mark brushed this aside. “It was like he said when I was talking to him last night before we went to bed. About how he doesn’t believe Charlie Shay was really murdered and about how you only want to cause trouble. And then he said it would all be much better if the investigation took place in Massachusetts, because the Bairds had ways of protecting themselves in Massachusetts that they don’t in places like Virginia and New Jersey and Delaware. We were right there in that room next to the mess hall with all the ship models in it—”

“Ship models?” Gregor was bewildered.

“Ships in bottles,” Tony said. “He’s very good at it.”

Gregor thought of that great elaborate thing in the mess hall. “Did he do the clipper ship with the flags—”

“In the mess hall?” Tony said. “Yes, he did. He did all the ships in bottles on this boat.”

“What do ships in bottles matter?” Mark Anderwahl said. “The radio, that’s what matters. It doesn’t matter if we’ve got a murder or not. We’ve got a dead man on this boat and my wife’s sick. We’ve got to get help.”

“You’ve got to get help,” Tony Baird said coldly. “You need a psychiatrist, Anderwahl. And a pair of glasses.”

“Why you son of a—”

Gregor thrust out his arms and pushed hard against Mark Anderwahl’s chest. Then, fractions of a second before it would have been too late, he whirled around and pushed against Tony’s. Tony went stumbling backward. Mark Anderwahl sat down abruptly, like a man who had been sent into shock.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Julie said. It was the first sound she had made since all this started. “You’ve got to stop this, both of you. What good is it going to do to cause another death on this boat?”

The three men turned to look at her. Gregor felt vaguely surprised. He had forgotten she was here. Tony and Mark both looked astonished and ashamed of themselves, like small boys caught fighting by their mothers. They also looked distinctly resentful. Here we are again, their faces seemed to say, with women coming around and spoiling all the fun.

It was the impression of a moment. A moment later, Gregor might have imagined it. That was when Mark broke away from their circle and hurried to his wife, holding out his arms to her as if she were a child he needed to comfort.

“Julie,” Gregor and Tony heard him saying. “Julie, I’m sorry.”

“He probably is sorry,” Tony muttered, and then, seeing that Gregor had heard him, shrugged. “I don’t understand how he lives. I don’t understand what he wants out of life. I don’t understand what you want out of life, either. I’m going below now.”

“Did you throw a radio or some kind of communicating device overboard?”

“Some kind of communicating device?” Tony smiled. “You mean like a spy phone or a laser satellite contact pencil or whatever it is James Bond is carrying around these days?”

“I mean like an emergency beeper.”

Tony shrugged again. “I don’t see that it matters anyway. If I did it’s gone and you’ll never be able to prove I had it. If I didn’t, this is just a lot of fuss about nothing. I am going below now.”

“So go.”

“Maybe I’ll stop in and see how Bennis is doing. At least there’s one person on this boat who appreciates what I’m up against.”

“If you mean Bennis, I don’t believe you.”

“Actually, I meant my father, but you weren’t supposed to notice.”

Tony turned away and nearly jogged down the deck, past the embracing Julie and Mark, toward the ladderlike staircase that led below. Gregor watched him until he disappeared, and then turned his attention to the other two.

Love and marriage were all well and good, in Gregor’s opinion. In fact, they were even better than that. The problem was, you could only indulge them so far under emergency conditions.

These, Gregor was sure, were emergency conditions. Murder always made the part of the world it touched spin a little out of control. It was that much harder when the people connected with that murder wanted to make the spin go faster and faster by the minute.

Besides, all this nonsense between Mark Anderwahl and Tony Baird made Gregor think of something.





Six


1


MARK ANDERWAHL WAS VERY conscious of the fact that his wife wanted him to talk to Gregor Demarkian about the things they had seen and heard around the time Donald McAdam died. Once he was well away from Tony Baird and calmed down to the point where he could think again, he remembered that. He rarely remembered much when he and Tony got into fights—and down through the years, he and Tony had gotten into many fights, although most of them hadn’t been physical. There was something about the idea of Tony as Heir Apparent that made Mark hot. Tony was brilliant and Tony was good-looking and Tony was brave—but Tony was also lazy as hell and spoiled rotten. Mark would never have allowed himself, or been allowed by the people around him, to indulge in Soho art galleries. He’d gone to prep school and he’d gone to college and then he’d gone to work. If he’d ever suggested he needed “time off” to “find himself,” he’d have been shown the back of his mother’s hand and ended up flipping burgers at the Home of the Whopper. That, his mother had told him, was the old-fashioned way. When she was growing up, rich young men were not indulged in their whimsies. They were trained to take up their responsibilities. Of course, Mark had never been a rich young man. His mother hadn’t had that much and his uncles weren’t the kind to pass out cash without a reason. Unlike Tony, he’d never found himself wandering around Paris at four o’clock in the morning, scared to death that the two thousand dollars in his pocket were going to get him mugged.