Mr. Monk Gets on Board (11 page)

“Yes, you were,” said Monk.

“Damn right I was.”

“Meanwhile, you checked your watch every few seconds and pretended to want dessert and waited for the alarm to go off.” Monk had stepped up. He was toe-to-toe with Sheffield now. Good for him.

“I believe it’s the first officer,” I said. “He would have the authority.”

“I knew that,” said Monk. “Don’t you think I know? It was a rhetorical question.”

“It didn’t sound rhetorical.”

“You two are crazy,” said the captain, and started to cross away. “No wonder you’re so desperate to drum up business.”

“Did you know she was pregnant?” That was me shouting it into the back of his uniform, trusting my ninety-two percent instinct.

The captain stopped and turned. “Pregnant?” His face was no longer red.

“Dr. Aaglan’s confirming it now,” I said. “I thought you might like to know.”

“That makes it even more tragic,” Sheffield said slowly, separating each word.

“When we get back, I’ll get the police to do a DNA test,” Monk said. “It will tell us who the father is.”

“I’m not going to let anyone swab my DNA. Out of the question.”

“We didn’t ask you to,” said Monk with a sly grin. “Unless you think you’re the father. Do you think you’re the father, Captain? Because we never even suggested that.”

I stood there with Monk, waiting until Captain Sheffield was through yelling his profanities at us. Then we watched him leave, past the
CREW ONLY
chain and up a flight of exterior stairs.

I wanted to be the first to say it. “He’s the guy.”

Monk scowled. “That’s for me to say.”

“We’re partners now. I have just as much right to say it as you.”

“Okay. Let’s start from the beginning,” said Monk. “He’s the guy.”

“That’s what I said.”

   C
HAPTER FOURTEEN

Mr. Monk Arranges Things

S
o here we were. Monk and me. Ignoring whatever else might be in our lives and trying to get justice for a girl who’d done nothing worse than fall in love with the wrong married man—not that there ever is a right married man.

I don’t want to make us sound like saints. Focusing on our own lives is certainly more important in the grand scheme. But moment to moment, we always choose something else. For example, I could be having a poolside piña colada with Malcolm Leeds. Instead, I was in the cafeteria, having lunch with a teenage boy with acne and braces and a doting father.

Barry Gilchrist was the chief operating officer of Ethersafe. According to the B. to Sea folder, it was a security company with a mandate to protect the secrets of its big business clients. This was a man I’d probably want to meet anyway. Who knows what kind of problems we might be able to help his company solve? But the reason I had sought him out and sat at his table was his son, Gifford.

In the past few hours, Gifford had become a minor celebrity on board, the thirteen-year-old who had pulled the alarm and tried to save Mariah Linkletter. “Are you a real detective?” he asked, putting down a greasy Tater Tot and picking up my card.

“Natalie and her partner are famous,” said Barry. “And she’s proud of you, buddy, for pulling that alarm.” The man was being so solicitous. All the clues pointed to a divorced dad taking his boy on a business vacation and hoping to survive the week.

“Very proud,” I improvised.

“Is your partner joining us?” Barry asked. “I’ve read a lot of articles about Adrian Monk.”

I glanced across the cafeteria to the massive circular buffet, where dozens of diners were pushing their trays along and reaching under the glass for plates of brown and white and faintly green food. Monk was right in the middle, pushing his empty tray, every now and then reaching in a hand, then pulling it out, as if he’d just touched fire. I think he and his orange vest were on their sixth time around the endless circle, and still his tray was empty.

“He’s trying to join us,” I said. “But I’m not sure he’ll make it.” They say a cat will starve itself to death rather than eat something it doesn’t like. Monk wasn’t that bad. He’d find a way to feed himself.

“Natalie wants to hear your story,” Barry prodded his son. “Tell Natalie.”

“Da-a-a-ad.” According to Gifford, the word has five syllables.

Barry explained. “I was worried when Giff stormed out of the dining room last night.” He lowered his voice. “But if he hadn’t gone out on deck and happened to see . . . you know, the accident . . . it would still be a mystery. The poor woman would have just disappeared, never to be found. It was lucky.”

“Everyone was wondering who pulled the alarm,” I said. “Why didn’t you come forward?”

“I didn’t want to get in trouble.” Gifford looked at his father and rolled his eyes. “But Dad kept bugging me. ‘Where were you? Where were you?’ I had to tell him something.”

“So, you were in the crew area,” I prodded. “Exploring the ship. I understand. And you saw Mariah fall.”

“I didn’t actually see her.” Gifford shifted his little brown eyes away from mine. “I mean, I couldn’t tell you what she was wearing. Or how she fell. But I heard a splash. And I looked over and I saw someone in the waves. A woman with red hair.”

“Was she conscious in the water?” I asked. “Was she still alive?”

“I don’t know,” said Gifford. “It happened so fast. Anyway, I pulled the alarm. That’s what matters.”

“Good. That was fast thinking,” I said. “Was it hard to pull? Did it take a lot of strength?”

“Strength?” He thought about it. ““I don’t know, you know? Sort of medium. Not hard, not easy. It was like, you know, loud. Very loud.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “I’ve never pulled an alarm like that.”

“Well, I did.”

When I glanced up to the space between father and son, I nearly jumped. There was Captain Sheffield heading straight for us across the cafeteria. He had plastered on a broad smile. “If it isn’t our little hero,” he said, hands spreading wide toward the thirteen-year-old. “I guess everyone wants to hear your story.”

“Yes, I do.” It wasn’t my wittiest line but it got my point across.

Papa Barry was beaming. “Hey there, Captain.”

Young Gifford rolled his eyes. “It’s no big deal. I wish people would stop asking me.”

Sheffield turned suddenly serious. “Is Ms. Teeger asking too many questions? Do you want her to stop?” He turned to Barry. “It’s probably not wise to subject a young boy . . .”

“No, no, not at all.” Barry Gilchrist laughed. “We’re honored. Do you know who this woman is?”

“Yes. She’s a criminal investigator.” The captain had managed to make it sound dangerous and sleazy, both of which it can be.

“I help catch bad guys,” I explained.

“What do you think, Gifford?” said the captain playfully. “Are you a bad guy? Is that why she’s asking so many questions?”

“I’m not a bad guy.”

“Glad to hear it. Just be careful.” And just like that, he walked away. It had taken Sheffield just a minute to undo any progress I may have made.

“I wish I never pulled that stupid bell,” Gifford grumbled.

“Giff, you don’t mean that,” his dad scolded.

Gifford shrugged. “Maybe.”

The teenager shifted his eyes again. I chased them with my own, just fast enough to see them flit by a table of teenage girls also in the thirteen-year-old range, huddled together. They were gossiping as only teenagers can, with a pretty, sandy-haired girl in the middle of everything. She glanced toward Gifford, and her conspiratorial look told me all I needed to know.

“I want more Tater Tots.” Gifford pushed back his chair and sauntered over to the food carousel.

“Excuse me,” I told his father, pushing back my own chair. “I need Tater Tots, too.”

I caught up with Gifford in front of the potato trays, just a few yards from the trio of girls. “You weren’t on the crew deck last night,” I whispered in the boy’s left ear. “You didn’t pull anything.”

Gifford looked shocked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Aha. My suspicions were confirmed. People say “I don’t know what you’re talking about” only when they know damn well what you’re talking about. “You were with a girl, weren’t you? What’s her name?”

The thirteen-year-old gasped and abandoned his empty tray on the buffet line. I watched as he headed straight out the door, onto the deck.

“Have you seen any wrapped cookies? Oatmeal is preferable. The machine-made kind. Chocolate chip is okay, although I find the randomness of the chips unsettling. When will the cookie-making industry learn?” It was Monk, on his eighth or ninth time around the buffet carousel, catching up to me. So far he had snagged one bottle of water, a wrapped pack of saltines, and a hard-boiled egg. “Maybe I’ll go around once more and see if they have any.”

“You do that. Good luck. Meanwhile, I’ll just mull over my conversation with young Gifford, the bell ringer.”

I waited in the same place on the food carousel until Monk made one more complete circle, searching for his precious wrapped cookies.

“What did you talk about?” he asked, picking up the conversation right where we’d left off.

“I reminded Gifford that he didn’t pull the alarm.”

Monk was puzzled. Human motivations often puzzled him, especially in young people. “Why would he lie about that?”

“Because it makes him a hero. And it stopped his dad from bugging him about where he’d really been.”

“You mean with a girl?” Monk asked, shuddering at the thought of anything even remotely hormonal.

“He was with a girl,” I confirmed. “Trust me. I know the signs.”

“What signs? Do you think Julie ever lied to you about boys?”

“Probably. I lied to my mother about boys.”

“I never lied to my mother. At all.”

What could I say? “Not everyone’s as well adjusted as you.”

Monk frowned. “So if this kid didn’t pull the alarm, who did? Why haven’t they come forward?”

“That’s for you to find out.”

“Right,” he agreed. “But first, I need to find a cookie.”

And he headed around the carousel one more time.

•   •   •

Today was a full day at sea, as we sailed down the Baja California coast to our Mexican port of call. With every passing hour, the
Golden Sun
swam its way into warmer waters. A Jamaican steel drum band played out by the pool and gave a sense of tropical climes, even if it did seem to be lost on the wrong side of the continent.

There was a seminar going on in the conference room, but I’d made up my mind not to feel guilty about missing a few meetings. A lot of attendees had started cutting class after the first two days and were just enjoying the slower pace and the nice weather. My excuse was that I didn’t want to split my focus. I didn’t want anything to keep me from figuring out—okay, helping Monk figure out—how Sheffield had done the impossible.

I hadn’t seen Monk since lunch, but he seemed to be adapting to shipboard life. In his own way. He kept alive by drinking his precious Fiji Water and eating packaged food during the day, plus enough bananas to give a monkey constipation. Yesterday evening, he’d joined me for dinner, but we’d both been understandably distracted, and I’m not sure if he ate anything or just rearranged his food into neat, non-touching piles.

As much as he wanted to spend the rest of the time in his cabin, he did have an assignment. Captain Sheffield knew this ship forward and backward and must have used some of this special knowledge to perform his little magic trick last night. I told Monk that he needed to learn the ship until he discovered the trick.

I was taking a few minutes on a chaise on the balcony level above the pool, feeling a little tropical despite the distractions. The steel band had just finished a set, and I was closing my eyes—in order to think better, I swear, not to take a nap.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute later when I was awakened by a piece of performance art going on in the open space below. I like to think of Monk’s spontaneous shenanigans as performance art. I find it helps me cope.

Someone was shouting: a shocked, outraged woman. That’s often how these performance pieces start. “What the hell are you doing?”

“You’ll thank me later,” came the familiar reply in the familiar voice.

I dragged myself to my feet, went to the railing, and looked down to the pool. There he was, my problem-child genius, standing out in his orange vest. Behind him a dozen plastic lounge chairs had been perfectly lined up an equal distance between pool and railing, exactly the same distance apart from one another. They might as well have been wearing a sign:
MONK WAS HERE
. In front of him was his biggest challenge: an immensely overweight woman in a gray one-piece swimsuit and an off-centered chair. She squirmed like a fish as Monk tried to drag her, lounge chair and all, to line up with the others.

“You have to be the same,” he ordered her. “Look at the others. They’re perfect.”

“Let me go,” the beached woman yelled back. “I moved my chair here to get sun.”

“No, no. That’s a common mistake,” said Monk. “You’ll feel better when you’re lined up with the other chairs. And your tan will be more even. It’s a scientific fact.”

“Who are you?” She shielded her eyes to get a better look. “I want to talk to your superior.”

“I don’t have a superior,” Monk said.

“That’s hard to believe.”

Monk was still trying to drag her into position. “I mean, I don’t work for the ship. I’m a consultant.” The metal legs screeched against the wooden deck, and the poor chair looked in danger of collapsing. “Are you aware how much you weigh? I’m no expert, but I’d say exactly two hundred and forty-seven pounds.” It was the textbook example of adding insult to potential catastrophic injury.

“No, I don’t.”

A few other passengers were starting to come to the woman’s rescue, crossing around the half-deserted pool. “Sir? Sir? Ma’am? Is everything all right?”

“No, it is not all right,” Monk and the woman said in near unison.

“I do not weigh two hundred and forty-seven pounds,” the woman felt obliged to add.

Just to make things more interesting, Monk’s old roommate Darby McGinnis had stumbled over from his regular post at the poolside bar to join the bevy of Good Samaritans. He had even put down his frothy white drink with the umbrella, that’s how annoyed he was.

“You again,” Darby barked. The wound on his left cheek was healing nicely, I was glad to see. “Is this jerk bothering you?”

“It’s not her so much. It’s her chair,” Monk said. “Come on. Help me move it.”

From my perch, I could now see Teddy, the assistant cruise director, coming through a door on the run. He had obviously been alerted, probably by a cocktail waiter.

“Teddy,” Monk shouted. “Thank God. Maybe you can talk some sense into this woman.”

“Mr. Monk. Good to see you, sir. You make the jokes again, I see. He’s a very funny man,” he added for everyone else’s benefit. “Professional comedian.”

Teddy had introduced himself to us last night while Monk spent twenty minutes trying to pick the right table in the dining room. He was a sweet, patient Cuban immigrant who instinctively knew how to defuse that situation and get Monk seated. I later found out that he had spent three days on a raft on his way to Miami, dealing with sharks and dehydration and drowning. I judged Teddy almost qualified enough to deal with Adrian Monk.