“Yes. I thought you would, and I might as well make use of you.”
Achille asked, “You buy drink, mon?”
Skip nodded, and signaled the barman. “What do you want, Achille?”
“Drink rum, mon.”
“A rum, please. Whatever kind you have. It might be best if there were a straw as well.”
The barman nodded. “I’m on it. What about you? I could get the kid a Coke or something.”
“Coffee,” Skip told him, “if you’re got it. What would you like, Jerry?”
Trinity looked startled. “This Jerry?”
“This is another Jerry.”
“Pepsi,” Jerry said. “Is that okay?”
Vanessa arrived soon after the drinks, bracing herself against the pitching of the ship and moving cautiously from one handhold to another. “Shouldn’t we be going?”
“I doubt it.” Skip stirred his surging coffee as he spoke. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in this, to tell you the truth. Have you found anything?”
She shook her head.
“Then this is all we have, this room Achille knows about on M Deck. If it doesn’t pan out—and I don’t believe it will—what are we going to do?”
In the silence that followed, Skip flipped open his mobile phone and selected Chelle’s number. Her phone was off; so was Susan’s.
“We need to talk to everyone who was at that party,” Vanessa said.
“I concur. Unless you can get us a list, we’ll have to talk to those we can find. If each of them names everyone else he can think of we may get something. I said may.” He drew in air and let it out. “We can ask about Jerry’s room at the same time.”
Achille grunted, bent over his shot glass, closed his mouth around it, and raised his head. The boy called Jerry watched him, fascinated, as he swallowed, lowered his head again, and spat out the shot glass.
“Did you see that!” Jerry’s eyes were wide.
“I did,” Vanessa told him. “I wish I hadn’t.”
“You don’t got to do this you say, mon.” Achille rose. “I take you now.”
M Deck, reachable by freight elevator, smelled of hot oil and smoke, and housed the storage batteries that hoarded the electrical energy created by the Rani’s wind-driven generators. Achille led the little group along a straight central corridor that seemed to reach beyond the ship, a corridor blocked at one point by what Skip decided was most likely a disassembled heat exchanger. Even here, well below the waterline, they could hear the crash of thunder.
“You see big door, mon? Door there, this side. You see him?”
As Skip was about to reply, the big door opened and a middle-aged man stepped out; he wore coveralls and carried a tool kit.
Skip waved to him. “Just a moment, please. We need to talk to you.”
He stopped, but shook his head. “You can’t schedule a job through me, sir. You’ll have to book it through the engineering office.”
“We don’t want to schedule anything,” Skip explained, “but I have to ask you a few questions.”
“Something go wrong with the hooks? I can probably fix ’em in a minute or two, but you ought to leave them with me and get a work order.”
“They’re fine.” Skip held out his hand. “My name’s Skip—Skip Grison. Are you Jerry?”
The man grinned. “No, sir. My name’s Gary.” He accepted Skip’s hand and shook it. “I’m Gary Oberdorf.”
Vanessa asked, “Is there a man named Jerry who works with you, Mr. Oberdorf?”
Skip began, “This is Gary—”
“We’ve already met.” Vanessa smiled. “He fixed a filing-cabinet drawer for me. Now it seems like a long time ago.”
“Nobody,” Oberdorf said. “There’s only four of us, ma’am. That’s Eddie Qualter, Walt Weber, Ray Upjohn, and me. Listen, I’d like to talk to you folks, but I’ve got to change the lock on Lieutenant Brice’s door.”
“We’ll walk with you,” Skip told him. “What’s the matter with Lieutenant Brice’s lock? Did someone break in?”
“No, sir. It’s just that he’s lost one card. The officers get two, just like passengers. Only he lost one, and anybody who finds it could go into his stateroom and take everything he’s got.”
“I see.” Skip nodded to himself. “Brice is in the infirmary, isn’t he? Isn’t he the officer who was shot?”
“Yes, sir. He was in the Navy, and I guess they get training there with pistols and so on. Only he had some bad luck.”
“A former serviceman.” Skip nodded again. “I don’t suppose you know his first name?”
“No, sir. No, I don’t.”
“Virginia?”
She shook her head.
“You got that li’l fold-away phone,” Trinity remarked. “I got me one, too.” She displayed it, flipped it open, and pressed keys. “Silvia, honey, this Trinity. You got that Lieutenant Brice where you workin’ now? I got a lady asking ’bout his first name. You know what ’tis?”
A moment later she thanked the woman she had called Silvia and closed her phone. “His name Gerard,” she told Vanessa.
Skip touched his lips before turning to Oberdorf. “Do you know how he happened to lose his cabin card?”
“I haven’t talked to him, sir.” He pressed the worn button that summoned the elevator. “But I know a lot of people lose things in the infirmary. They’ve got those lockers in there, and they hang the patients’ clothes in them. Only they don’t lock. Visitors come in and go out all the time. I got my foot broke once, and they put me in there for a couple of days before we made port, so I know how it is.”
“Chelle had a private room,” Skip said.
“Is that a lady? They’ve got two rooms like that for women, because it’s nearly all men. So they get those and don’t hear the nasty words. Not that they don’t know them already, if you ask me.”
The freight elevator arrived. They went into it, and Oberdorf pressed a button for the signal deck.
“I don’t understand this at all,” Vanessa whispered.
“Later,” Skip told her, and turned to Oberdorf. “Will you have to open the door to change the lock?”
“Sure. That’s the only way you can get those locks out, sir. You open the door, take off both knobs, and slip the lock out the side. That lets you get at the little keyboard. When you’ve got it, you can wipe the old code and stick in your new card. Press a couple of buttons and your new card opens the lock.”
“I see.”
“Hotels and so on use a different system, mostly. They can send a wireless signal that will change the code. Only a hell of a lot of people can send them now, and read them, too. Ours is more secure.”
“You’ve got to have a card?”
“Yes, sir. Or a master. Got to be able to open that lock before you can change the lock. Only a hell of a lot of passengers just walk off with their cards at the end of the cruise, sir. We try to get them to turn them in.” He shrugged.
“But they don’t.”
“Right. About half don’t. So one of the things we’ve got to do when we refit is recode those locks. Generally it takes one man four days to do them all. After the last cruise it took Walt and Ray three.”
Skip had to brace himself against the side of the elevator.
“She pitchin’ now,” Trinity remarked. “This wind behind her. Don’t nobody like it.”
Vanessa said, “It must make us sail faster, though.”
“No, ma’am. Off to the side and jus’ a little bitty bit back is what they want. That’s the fastest, and don’t pitch much. Don’t roll much neither.”
“Are we gonna sink?” Jerry clearly hoped they would.
“Not us, honey. We been through lots worse than what this is.”
The elevator doors slid open. The ship’s motion seemed more pronounced here, the thunder almost deafening. Oberdorf ambled down the corridor, compensating for the pitching floor without apparent effort.