Mr. Monk Gets on Board (10 page)

   C
HAPTER TWELVE

Mr. Monk and the Alibi

“I
t only took two hours to get everything cleaned. And I only used two maids. Two maids plus me, so I guess that’s the equivalent of four maids.”

I felt a little insulted. “Adrian, I spent all of one night in that room.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I’m surprised it only took two hours. Can’t you take a compliment?”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, and I’m sorry you spilled a bottle of Chanel No. 5. I know how expensive that is.”

“I didn’t spill anything. I used a drop or two last night behind my ears. Is that a crime?”

“Getting rid of the smell took the maids half an hour. Don’t worry, I paid for it.”

“That’s so generous.”

“Well, I think it’s a fair trade for you giving up your room.”

“Are you sure I don’t owe you anything?”

“We’ll call it a draw.”

I didn’t respond. Monk squiggled his nose and watched as I toyed with the three tiny lamb chops on my plate. He had been given the same food and had spent much of the dinner moving it around—just like me, but for hygienic reasons rather than emotional ones. “You know, you’re paying even less attention to me than normal,” he said.

“I’m trying, but you don’t make it easy.”

It was a semiformal evening in the dining room, with the women in elegant dresses and the men in suits and ties. I was in a long, lavender affair, a little off the shoulder, a reworking of a bridesmaid dress from six years ago. Monk was in his usual checked shirt and brown jacket and orange life vest. It was still drawing its share of stares.

We had situated ourselves at a table with an unobstructed view of the dining room’s double doors. It was a table for four, but we’d been saving a place for Mariah, as I promised, and no one had taken the fourth spot. Every minute or so, I would glance over to the doors, hoping to see her walk in.

“I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight,” I said. “At least the captain is still here.”

Captain Sheffield was seated at the large circular table in the middle of the dining room, next to his wife. He was once again in his officer whites, and his wife was in what we used to call a cocktail dress, black and strapless with a cinched waist. For a woman a little north of me in age, she still had quite a figure.

“Yes,” agreed Monk. “The captain’s still here.” His tone was not reassuring.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Probably nothing.”

“Will you let me know when it means something?”

“You’ll be the first. Actually the second, after me.”

I tried turning my attention back to my lamb chops, but they were cooling on the plate, and Geraldo, our waiter, was beginning to make wide circles like a vulture hungry for a few more dirty plates.

“You missed the five o’clock talkback seminar. Both of you.”

That was Malcolm, of course, walking up to us and looking disappointed.

I’d seen him at his table across the room, laughing and eating and drinking with a circle of two women and five men, including Gregor Melzer, the Russian lawyer who’d taken my card last night. All of them seemed important and well-connected in their shiny red name tags.

I felt a pang of guilt. I hadn’t even remembered to put mine on. And I knew Monk would never wear his, not unless he had a name tag for each lapel and a level to make sure they were lined up straight.

“Did we miss it? I’m sorry.” I vaguely remembered a seminar in the schedule, happening around the same time I was unsuccessfully chasing Mariah in the crew quarters.

“I think you were the only ones not represented,” he went on. “Everyone else got up, said a few words about their company, answered some questions, and tried to make a good impression.”

“We’ll do better tomorrow,” I half promised. “Today just got away from us.” How embarrassing. Not that I regretted how I’d spent the time. We were on a case. This is what we did.

“I’m sorry, too,” Malcolm lilted. “I shouldn’t scold you. It’s your business. I’m just trying to help.”

“And I appreciate it,” I said. “I really do. It’s just that—”

“Shh.”

Monk had a finger lifted to his lips, and a finger from his other hand gestured at the captain’s table. Something was happening.

“What’s he doing?” asked Malcolm, staring at Monk.

“Nothing,” I said softly. “Sorry.” But when it looked like Malcolm was going to speak again, I doubled down with a “shh” of my own. He shushed.

In a previous life, when I’d worked for two years in a Las Vegas casino, I used to make a game of isolating voices. I would stand at my croupier station, taking bets and spinning the roulette wheel, but I would really be focusing on an overhead mirror, trying to hear what my pit boss, a woman, might be saying to the floorman, her unhappily married boyfriend. It was the most entertainment I had all shift, until one day when I heard them discussing me and the fact that I seemed to be distracted all the time. That had put a stop to my fun.

I was still pretty good at isolating voices. And so was Monk.

“Dear, I have a headache,” Sylvia Sheffield was telling her husband two tables away. She had stood up and was reaching for her Gucci clutch bag hanging from the back of her chair. If you’re wondering how I knew it was Gucci, you must be a guy.

“Stay for dessert,” the captain said, his voice solicitous but firm. “Kathy was right in the middle of a story, weren’t you, Kathy?”

The tablemate to the captain’s left, a blowsy, flowery woman in a Lilly Pulitzer, sputtered and said how it wasn’t important and how dreadful it must be to have a headache on a moving ship. “I totally understand,” she told Sylvia. “Feel better.”

“You should stay,” the captain said, more firmly than before. Then he checked his watch, a subtle movement of the eye and wrist. “I hear it’s a wonderful dessert.”

“But you never eat dessert,” Sylvia complained.

“Tonight we’ll make an exception.”

Monk leaned across the table to me. “That’s the third time he checked his watch. I’ve been counting.”

I had missed the first two, to be honest, and had barely caught the third. “What does it mean?” I whispered back.

“He’s establishing an alibi. For him—and his wife.”

“What are you talking about?” Malcolm asked, more annoyed than curious.

“Establishing an alibi?” It took a second for me to understand what Monk meant. “Oh my God. It’s happening now?”

I was up from the table so quickly I nearly knocked down Geraldo, who was passing behind us with a towering tray of chocolate somethings. Monk was up a second later, and we both headed for the double doors. “Sorry, Malcolm,” I called out over my shoulder. “Sorry, Geraldo.”

Monk was right behind me. We stopped in the foyer and faced each other. It was crazy to think that the smiling captain was at this moment somehow killing his mistress. But things like this happen in our world. “Where do you think?” I asked.

“Suicide in her room?” Monk suggested. “It needs to be an enclosed, controlled space.”

“An accident?” I suggested back. “Nearly everyone’s at dinner, so there’s little chance of witnesses.”

This was another part of our shorthand. When the killer goes to such lengths to give himself an ironclad alibi, then you’re probably looking at a “suicide” or “accident.”

“I’ll check her cabin,” I said. “You check the decks.”

Monk winced. “I’m not that fond of open decks and oceans. Maybe I’ll check my room.”

“Adrian, she’s not in your room. Go.” I pushed him toward the stairs going up. “Check the lounge or the game room or anywhere. Go.”

I took the stairs going down, fumbling in my pocket for my key card. I didn’t want to think about it, but there was a chance Mariah was already dead, her body lying somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

No, I told myself. She had to be alive. Sheffield was checking his watch, which meant he was waiting for something. What could it be? A certain time? A message? A phone call? All these possibilities went through my head as I tumbled down flight after flight until finally using my key card on the door to the crew quarters.

I don’t know how I found our cabin so quickly. I certainly wasn’t counting doorways and turns. But there it was: “Mariah Linkletter,” hand-printed in the little cardholder. I took a deep breath, steeled myself, swiped my card, and pushed open the door.

Nothing. Just our bunk beds, neatly made up, and a few personal things on the tiny tidy desk. I’m not sure if I was happy or sad. At least she wasn’t dead in the room.

I was deciding what to do next when an alarm bell began ringing far away, several levels away. Seconds later, other alarm bells were triggered, and the constant rumbling of the engines underneath me turned into a grinding sound, metal on metal, and died. The ship had been stopped, dead in the water. This was not good.

Through the open door I could see several stewards putting on their life jackets and running in the direction of the stairs. “What is it?” I shouted to no one and everyone. “What’s the alarm?”

“Man overboard,” someone shouted back, and kept running.

“Mariah.” My heart sank. Whatever had happened, I suddenly knew we were too late.

I followed the line of scrambling crew members, at least until we got to the Calypso deck, the lowest of the outside decks, divided between a few public spaces and crew spaces. There they split up, going to whatever assignments they’d been given for an emergency like this. My emergency assignment, as always, was Monk.

At some point, as I raced from deck to deck, from room to room, I heard the engines rumble back to life. Probably in reverse, I thought, back to approximately wherever we’d been when the alarm had sounded. A minute or so later, the engines stopped. I must have been near the bow at the time because I could hear the heavy anchor chain start rolling off its spool.

From then on it was a simple process of following the people and the lights.

Most of the action seemed to be toward the front of the Calypso deck. That’s where I found Monk. He was off to the side, sheltered by a lifeboat, trying not to be crowded by the other thirty or so onlookers, all held back by a pair of hard-faced stewards. Beyond them all, the ship’s front searchlights were panning the wide expanse of moonlit water.

Monk caught my eye but didn’t speak. Instead, he pointed to the captain, leaning over the starboard railing, binoculars up to his eyes.

“There,” shouted another officer with binoculars. The man pointed. It took a few more seconds for us to make out the body, fifty yards or so away, just a head bobbing in the gentle swells, looking so peaceful. Even from here we could see Mariah’s hair flowing around her face, like a halo of crimson seaweed.

“She’s dead,” Monk said flatly.

“No,” I protested. He didn’t even seem to be looking at her. “You can’t know that for sure.”

Four crew members came running in our direction and politely shooed us out of the way. Within seconds the lifeboat was being lifted from the deck and swung out over the side.

“Don’t look at her,” Monk said. “Look at the captain. His attitude. His stance. His shoulders. The man knows she’s dead.”

Monk was right, of course. Damn it.

   CH
APTER THIRTEEN

Mr. Monk and the Guy

S
he was laid out on the examining table, the girl named after Mariah Carey, cold and in rigor, her copper-colored hair tucked behind her ears and under her shoulders. I was surprised to see her freckles had disappeared. Perhaps they were still there, under the blue of her new skin tone.

“I need to put her back in the morgue,” said Dr. Aaglan. He could barely look at her without tearing up. “People need the infirmary, and I can’t have a dead body here.”

Monk was still examining Mariah. Naked living women can cause him to run away in horror. Naked dead women have no effect. That’s just the way it is.

He inspected the gash on her left temple, probably caused when her head hit the ship on her fall into the ocean. From there he moved his focus to her fingers and toes, which could tell him approximately how long she’d been in the ocean. There was a greasy stain an inch wide on her left side, running most of the length of her pearl gray dress. I didn’t know what that meant, and I guessed Monk didn’t know, either. I took pictures of everything on my iPhone.

The previous night we’d learned nothing, except for a few rumors. A relatively small ship like this can be like a family. And Mariah, a lively and warmhearted cruise director, can seem like everyone’s sister. The crew quickly closed in around the tragedy, excluding the passengers from any hard information. No one cared that the famous Adrian Monk was on board, willing to investigate. I had even given my brochure to the ship’s security officer. He treated me like he would any ambulance chaser trying to turn a horrible accident into a job.

By morning, things had loosened up slightly, and Dr. Aaglan proved willing to let us look at the body, provided we didn’t tell the captain, which was perfectly fine with us. More than fine.

“Did you take a postmortem temperature?” Monk asked, still fingering the long, mysterious grease stain.

“No reason to,” said Aaglan, a little defensively. “We know when she fell.” He was right. Even I could see—from the condition of the body and the lack of bloating—that she’d been in the water only a few minutes.

“Was there water in her lungs?” Monk asked.

“I don’t have the means to do an autopsy,” said Aaglan. “Even if I could cut her open, I wouldn’t. Besides, it makes no difference.”

He was right. Again. The blow she suffered before hitting the water could have been enough to kill her instantly. Even with an autopsy, no one could say for sure if she’d been killed before her fall or after.

“The alarm was pulled in the crew area of the Calypso deck, near the bow,” the doctor continued, telling us what we already knew. “The bow is always more bumpy, especially on an old ship design like this at the speed we were going. And there was a large wet patch on the deck. My guess—I shouldn’t call it a guess, because it’s going in my report—is that she’d had too much to drink, slipped on the wet patch, and fell.”

“Wait,” I said. “Mariah didn’t drink. I was at a bar with her last night. She had club soda.”

“Mariah drank,” Aaglan countered. “Many an evening, we tossed back a few brews at the Valencia bar.” The doctor had a slightly odd way with American slang. For some reason I was thinking Dutch or Danish.

“No. She stopped drinking,” I insisted.

“You’re wrong,” said Dr. Aaglan. “We have the equipment on board to do basic blood work. For employee drug tests. There was alcohol in her system. It was one of the first things I checked.”

“Well, you made a mistake. Mariah didn’t drink. She was pregnant.” I don’t know how I was so sure of it. But I was, so we’ll just leave it at that.

“Pregnant?” asked Aaglan.

“Why don’t you check?” Monk was obviously annoyed with the doctor’s work. “It’s too late to check body temp or lividity or to time the onset of rigor. But you can still do a pregnancy test.”

“Of course,” said Aaglan. “I’m just surprised Mariah didn’t tell me, if it’s true. We were friends and I was her doctor.”

•   •   •

“Mariah Linkletter didn’t tell you about her pregnancy,” whispered Monk as we stepped out onto the Calypso deck. “You can’t fool me. You guessed.”

“The same way you guess with your eighty-six percent or your nineteen percent.”

“Those aren’t guesses.”

“I’m putting this one at ninety-two. You want to lay odds?”

Monk didn’t take the bait. “We’ll find out soon enough.” We both were nursing bad moods, but mine was worse. I was upset with myself, with the world, mostly with Captain Sheffield.

“It certainly increases the motive,” Monk said. “Even if Sheffield didn’t know about the pregnancy, Mariah would have been pressuring him to leave his wife.”

We had left the infirmary and gone straight to the Calypso deck, to the spot that, just between us, we were calling the crime scene. We checked for passersby—no one—then unhooked the chain that read
CREW ONLY
and let ourselves in. Nothing had been changed since the night before, except that the lifeboat was back on deck, hanging from its davits.

“Do you think we should call Stottlemeyer?” I asked.

“Jurisdiction,” Monk said simply. “Plus, no official crime. Plus, the man legally in charge of your floating island is our bad guy.”

I sighed in exasperation. This was a relatively narrow space, just a dozen yards or so before the starboard and port sides met to form the prow. With the ship moving, there was a constant, buffeting wind. It would be easy enough to fall.

“What was she doing up here?” Monk asked. “Why wasn’t she at dinner?”

“I’ll ask around,” I said. That was one part of the job I did better than him, asking questions without people hating me or becoming scarred for life.

It felt odd to be investigating a scene without yellow tape or gloves or plastic booties. It also felt odd not to have Monk circling the scene, holding out his hands in front of him, framing the scene. Monk was currently using his hands to hug the wall behind him.

“Do you want me to walk around and frame the scene?” I volunteered.

“What good would that do?”

“I don’t know what good it does, period. Just thought I’d offer.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Monk said. “The front is one of my eighteen least favorite parts of a ship.” I had no clue what the other seventeen parts were, but I assumed they added up to the whole rest of a ship. “Where’s the alarm?” he asked. “The one that was pulled?”

I found it five feet away, on the same wall he was hugging. Like all the others around the ship, it was red, about four feet off the deck, with a handle below and a bell on top. The bell was large, about the size of a honey bun, with an old-fashioned hammer poised about an inch and a half away. Above it was a sign, also in red:
MAN OVERBOARD. EMER
GENCY USE ONLY.

“Shouldn’t it be ‘person overboard’?” I asked, crossing back to where Monk stood. “Just to be correct.”

“Bird, bird, bird,” Monk said. “Bird, bird, bird.”

“Bird overboard?”

I turned back in time to see a gray and white plover with horizontal stripes across its chest, like a feathery inmate. It stood directly below the alarm, drinking in little gulps from a puddle on the deck.

Monk’s normal disdain for nature quickly turned into fascination. “Do those things drink salt water or freshwater?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. I knew from a childhood spent near the beach that seagulls drink salt water. But a lot of other coastal birds don’t. I wasn’t sure about cute little plovers.

“Shoo,” Monk said, and jerked his head just enough to scare the bird into flight. “Good. That’s better. Natalie, go taste the water. I want to see if it’s salty.”

I looked at the puddle, then back at him. “You want me to taste the puddle?”

“Yes. I’d do it myself, but I’m germophobic.”

I almost laughed. “You would not do it yourself, not if the puddle was hermetically sealed and filled with Fiji Water.”

“That’s why I’m asking you. You’re not germophobic, are you?”

“No, I’m not germophobic. But I’m not an idiot.”

“I never knew you to be afraid of a little water. Just taste it. On your finger.”

“No,” I said. “It’s water on a dirty deck that a bird was stepping in. Besides, it has to be salt.”

“We’ll know for sure if you taste it.”

“I am not tasting it.”

“Does that mean you’re ornithophobic? An irrational fear of birds? Even I’m not ornithophobic, and I’m everything.”

“Then you drink the puddle,” I told him.

“I’d love to, but I’m germophobic.”

It was almost a relief when Captain Sheffield caught us, forcing us to stop our annoying banter. He was dressed in his blues today, perhaps his form of mourning, and came walking around from the port side. He stopped when he saw us. “Mr. Monk? Miss Teeger?”

Out of five hundred passengers, we were two he remembered by name. I wasn’t sure I liked that. “This area is restricted to crew,” he informed us.

“Captain. Good morning.” I turned on the charm. “So sorry. I guess we didn’t see the sign.”

He looked past us. “You mean the sign on the chain you had to take down in order to get in here?”

“Natalie just wanted to see the spot,” Monk said. “She’s got this morbid side to her, don’t you, Natalie? Do you have any idea why Ms. Linkletter was on a slippery outside deck in the dark, instead of in the dining room, Captain?”

“I don’t know why she was here. No one does.”

“Someone does,” Monk said. “I mean, the girl wasn’t alone. Someone must have seen her and pulled the alarm. Unless she did that herself.”

“Yes. We were wondering about that,” Sheffield said with a thin smile. “Who pulled the alarm?”

“And do you know?”

“As a matter of fact, it was a passenger. Teenage boy. He came forward this morning. Poor kid was afraid of getting into trouble for being in a crew area. And then the whole trauma of the death scared him.”

I was taken aback by this revelation. This could change everything. If someone innocent had seen the whole thing, then how . . . “Did this boy actually see Mariah fall?”

“He didn’t actually see it, but . . .” The captain had steely blue eyes, which were now piercing my watery brown ones. “What are you implying?”

“We would like to speak to this witness,” said Monk, “if that’s okay.”

The captain squared his shoulders. “You’re free to speak to any passenger, of course. I can’t stop you, as long as you don’t annoy them to the point they complain, which you undoubtedly will, given your history. But this is not a police investigation.”

“An investigation?” I tried to laugh it off. “Who said anything—”

“I have informed the San Francisco authorities of the accident. If Ms. Linkletter’s relatives want an autopsy, that’s their right. This sort of event is tragic but hardly unique. The cruise industry has systems in place to deal with accidents.”

“So that’s it?” I found his attitude more than a little callous. “Life just goes on?”

Sheffield pursed his lips and shook his mane of white hair. “I know who you are, Ms. Teeger. Mr. Monk.” Then from out of a jacket pocket he pulled one of our glossy brochures and unfolded it.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.
Probably from his security officer,
I thought.
Little snitch.

“You two are private detectives, trying to drum up corporate clients. Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that what you’re trying to do now, create a big, flashy case out of a poor woman’s tragedy?”

“No.” Monk glared my way. “I’m here because my ex-employee suddenly thinks she’s my boss and wanted to take this stupid, useless trip without me. Hold on, is that a brochure? Natalie, we have a brochure?”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “We have a brochure.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Monk grabbed a corner of it for a closer look. “Is that a four-color process? It looks expensive.”

“Adrian, the brochure will pay for itself.”

“Does that mean we don’t have to?”

“No, we still have to pay for it.”

“Thought so. How many of these did you make? How many did you hand out already? Maybe we can get our money back.”

“We’re not getting our money back.”

“My God.” Sheffield pulled back the brochure. “You two are like amateur hour.”

The captain had a point. Not just about amateur hour. About everything. To an innocent man, it might appear that we were trying to take advantage of the death to impress a captive audience. But Sheffield wasn’t innocent. He was, in my expert opinion, a cold-blooded killer trying to shame us into stopping before we even began.

“Who is your number two on this ship?” asked Monk out of nowhere.

“What? My number two?” The captain seemed thrown.

“The person who takes command if you’re incapacitated,” Monk explained. “You know, sick or dead. Or arrested for murder.”

“Arrested for murder? What murder?”

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, a crew member.”

“What kind of insanity is this?” The captain’s face turned red, which I find often happens when people are bellowing at full voice. “First off, Mariah Linkletter was not murdered. And if by some chance she was, it wasn’t me. I was with you in the dining room, in full view of hundreds of people.”