King Danforth couldn’t sleep.
The Norwegian cruise ship Valhalla, in spite of her widely advertised stabilizers, was rolling heavily as she forged through the South China Sea toward Hong Kong. It was 5:30 in the morning; the Valhalla was forty hours out of Jesselton, North Borneo, her most recent port of call; and King lay in his bunk, wide-awake. His wife, Carol, was still asleep.
Without awakening her he slid out of bed, donned slacks, jersey, and sandals, quietly opened their cabin door, and emerged on the sun deck. A glance showed him that he had the ship to himself. Not even a Norwegian deckhand was in evidence. The rising sun revealed the eastern horizon as a faintly rosy undulating line between the sky and the heaving sea.
He walked aft, toward the sunrise, feeling proud of the sea legs he had acquired in half a hundred days at sea. He needed them this morning — to counter the unpredictable movements of the deck under his feet. Ten-foot seas, he judged, the aftermath of a week-old typhoon in whose wake they sailed.
Reaching the rail at the aft end of the sun deck, he decided to descend to the main deck for his stroll and moved to the head of the railed staircase that led down to it.
It was just as he started down the stairs that he saw the body.
A man lay asprawl on the deck at the foot of the steps, supine, limbs slack and disordered, a macabre study in black and white: black hair, black dinner jacket, and black shoes; white face and ruffled white shirt front. King’s instant conjecture was that some elderly or possibly drunken passenger, trying to negotiate the staircase in the heavy seas, had fallen headlong down the stairs.
He ran down the steps and bent over the man, feeling for a pulse and trying to recognize the upturned face. It was familiar but not one to which he could attach a name. Nor could he find a pulse in the thin wrist. When he looked at the man’s face again, he understood why. A horizontal depression, deep enough to lay a finger in, ran across the man’s forehead just below the hairline, with an area of bruised and dusty skin around it.
King rose slowly to his feet. No use listening for a heartbeat. That massive skull fracture left no doubt the man was dead.
When King and his wife joined Martin and Helen Leroy in the dining room for breakfast, King told them all about it. The Leroys were jolted by the news. The death of any member of a ship’s company is always unsettling — a far more immediate reminder of man’s mortality than a random death ashore.
“His name was Calvin Speaker, apparently,” Danforth finished. “We’ve seen him around on the cruise — at informative talks and on shore excursions and so on. You know him, Mart?”
Leroy shook his head. “Calvin Speaker? Nope. Can’t place him.”
“Bushy guardsman-type mustache, long sideburns, patent-leather hair,” Danforth said.
Helen spoke up. “I think I know who he was. Quite handsome in a dark saturnine way. He used to sit beside the dance floor evenings, drinking Brandy Alexanders and staring at me a lot.”
Her husband chuckled. “Everybody does,” he said. He was proud of her good looks.
“He was traveling alone,” Danforth said, “according to the passenger list. Mr. Calvin Speaker from Sacramento.”
Carol murmured, “Poor man! It’s sad to die alone and so far away from home.”
Martin Leroy gave his partner a curious look. “Listen, King, how come this news hasn’t hit the ship’s rumor mill yet?”
“The doctor asked me to keep it quiet until next of kin is notified and official cause of death determined — you know the routine. Then the Captain will announce it.”
“Cause of death!” Helen caught him up. “I thought you said he fell down the steps and cracked his head.”
“Yeah,” Martin Leroy said. “Didn’t he?”
“The doctor thinks so.”
“Don’t you?” Leroy stared at his friend. “What are you hinting at?”
Helen curled her beautiful lips. “Now don’t tell me there’s something mysterious about this! Just because you two write mystery stories, you surely aren’t looking for a plot in a poor lonely man falling down the stairs!”
King rubbed a big hand over his hair and reached for another piece of toast. “There were a couple of odd things about Calvin Speaker’s death.”
“Odd?” Leroy asked.
“The guy still had his dinner jacket on, for one thing.”
“At five-thirty this morning?”
“Right.” On the Valhalla it was de rigueur to dress for dinner every night at sea except Sundays.
“What else?” asked Leroy.
“He had dust on his forehead.”
Helen said, “You’re trying to make something out of that?”
Danforth put marmalade on his toast and shrugged.
Leroy said, “Because he still had his dinner jacket on, King, you think he fell down the stairs last night?”
Danforth nodded.
“So what’s odd about that?” Helen wanted to know.
“If he fell down the steps last night, the night watchman or a deckhand should have found him long before I did this morning. They scrub down the decks every night, you know. And the night watchman makes four complete rounds of the ship, inside and out, every night.”
Leroy nodded. “And what’s odd about Speaker having dust on his forehead?”
“Yes,” his wife chimed in, “isn’t it perfectly natural for a man who falls down a whole flight of steps to get some dust on his head?”
Danforth answered almost reluctantly. “Not on this ship, it isn’t. They keep it cleaner than a baby’s crib. I rubbed my finger over those stair treads this morning and got no dust at all. Not a speck.”
Leroy, munching his third buckwheat cake, said, “Excellent procedural technique, my boy. Under the circumstances I agree that dust was extremely odd. What did Dr. Hagen say?”
“He didn’t say what he was obviously thinking — that I was out of my skull to ask about a spot of dust on a dead man’s forehead.”
Helen gave King a dazzling smile. “My respect for the doctor rises, darling. He’s a fine diagnostician to recognize you so quickly as a mental case.”
“Thanks.” Danforth grinned. “I love it when you’re sweet to me like that. Is Helen sweet to you too, Mart?”
“Never,” Leroy confessed. “But then, she’s my wife.”
Carol snapped, “Stop that horrible joking when poor Mr. Speaker is hardly cold yet!”
“You bring up an important point,” Leroy said. “How about that, King? Any rigor mortis when you found him?”
“Some. Dr. Hagen thought it was ghoulish of me to ask about that too.”
“I like the doctor better all the time,” Helen said.
King continued, “So I compromised. I suppressed my curiosity about rigor mortis and settled for a promise from the doc that he’d take a look at that funny gray dust on Speaker’s forehead.”
“You mean under a microscope?”
“Exactly. And report his findings—” Danforth looked toward the dining-room entrance. “There’s Dr. Hagen now. Excuse me.” He got up and went over to the doorway. The others watched him greet the tall ship’s doctor. Dr. Hagen said something to Danforth, then shook his head and turned away. King came back to the table and sat down. “He had to get back to the sick bay.”
Leroy said, “How about the dust on Speaker’s forehead?”
“You’ll never guess what it was.”
“I will,” Carol said. “I figured it out long ago. Dandruff.”
“Quiet, woman,” Leroy commanded, “while two mature minds wrestle with this odd discrepancy in an otherwise run-of-the-mill accident. Well, King?”