Futrelle tossed a smirk over his shoulder. “A peaceful death, did you say, Mr. Ismay?”
Crafton was a scrawny, even malnourished man with the scars of skin conditions and diseases upon his nearly hairless naked body.
“Did you strip him as well as the bed, Doctor?”
“No, sir. He’s just as I found him-on his back, naked in bed…. No nightclothes or underthings.”
Futrelle leaned in for a closer look. What he saw was hideous: the whites of Crafton’s eyes were so clotted with burst vessels they were almost crimson.
“Petechial hemorrhaging, Doctor?”
Dr. O’Loughlin blinked in surprise; the nod that followed was barely perceptible.
Futrelle examined the corpse’s hands, finding them-palms up-clawlike, a state grotesquely exaggerated by the rigor mortis.
Standing away from the corpse, Futrelle nodded to the doctor to cover Crafton back up, asking, “How many pillows was he sleeping with?”
“Just one,” the doctor said.
“Where was the extra pillow? In its position near the headboard?”
“No. Halfway down the bed, as if…” The doctor glanced at Ismay, then shrugged.
“As if discarded,” Futrelle said.
The captain stepped forward and said to Futrelle, “What was that medical term you used, sir?”
“Petechial hemorrhaging,” Futrelle said. “A person being suffocated tries so hard to breathe, the blood vessels in the eyes burst. The clawed hands are another clear signal. Doctor, you may wish to examine under the fingernails for skin scratched from-”
“This is nonsense,” Ismay said. His face was almost as red as Crafton’s eyes had been.
“You’re saying that this man was suffocated,” the captain stated calmly.
“I have no doubt,” Futrelle said. He nodded toward the pile of bed things. “With one of those pillows, most likely.”
“Doctor,” Ismay said, rage barely in check, “are these symptoms also consistent with heart failure or some other kind of natural cause?”
The doctor said nothing.
“Well, Doctor?” the captain asked.
“Perhaps,” he said, with a shrug.
“Then as far as any of us are concerned,” Ismay said forcefully, “this is death by natural causes. Is that understood?”
No one replied.
“Good,” Ismay said.
Directing the question to all three of them, Futrelle asked, “Doesn’t it concern you that you have a murderer aboard?”
Ismay’s grimace was worse than Crafton’s. “To have a murderer aboard, Mr. Futrelle, we would first have to have a murder.”
“I understand your reluctance to involve passengers of prominence like Colonel Astor, Major Butt, Mr. Guggenheim and the rest… but you might be endangering them, if a malevolent presence is aboard this ship.”
Ismay sighed heavily. “Mr. Futrelle…”
“What happened to ‘Jack’?”
“Jack.” And now Ismay spoke with withering sarcasm: “Let us suppose your diagnosis, and not Dr. O’Loughlin’s, is the correct one; let’s assume that years of medical school and years of the practice of medicine are no match for the expertise of a writer of mystery stories. What would be the motivation for Mr. Crafton’s… removal?”
“Oh, I don’t know-possibly that he was a goddamned blackmailer.”
“Precisely. This is not the work of Jack the Ripper, sir-if it’s ‘work’ at all. Even if I wanted this matter investigated, I have limited security on the ship-the master-of-arms and his small staff. The ‘suspects,’ if you will, are wealthy individuals, traveling with retinue that could easily include a manservant or two, willing to dispatch an odious task of this nature. Someone like Major Butt, with his military background, would certainly have the stomach for it, himself.”
Futrelle nodded. “We’re certainly not lacking in possibilities for perpetrators.”
Ismay threw his hands up. “For now, there is really nothing to be done. I ask everyone in this room-everyone, Mr. Futrelle… Jack-to keep this unpleasant news to themselves. We won’t be having stewards carting a body down the corridor, either. We will keep this room locked and the body will be removed to the cold-storage hold, tonight, when the ship is sleeping.”
Futrelle regarded the cold-blooded Ismay with the dispassion of a scientist. “Not that anyone will be upset by the lack of his presence… but how will you explain the absence of Mr. Crafton?”
Ismay was walking in a tiny circle in the tiny cabin. “Should anyone ask, he’s taken ill, he is under Dr. O’Loughlin’s care, staying here in his cabin. Though I hardly think on a ship this size, and with an individual so unloved, that this is likely to even come up.”
“You may be right,” Futrelle admitted.
Through all this, the captain had remained strangely silent.
In the hallway, with the room locked up tight, Ismay leaned in to Futrelle and whispered, “Now, I must ask you not to mention this to anyone, Jack-anyone… including your lovely wife.”
Futrelle grinned and patted Ismay on the back. “Do I look like the sort of man who tells his wife everything?”
Ten minutes later, in the sitting room of their stateroom, Futrelle had finished filling May in on all the details, including the more grisly ones.
They were sitting on the couch together, but May had her legs up under herself, and was turned toward her husband; she looked bright as a new penny in her casual day wear-white shirt with stiff collar and cuffs, blue woolen necktie, cream-color collarless cardigan and flared beige wool skirt.
She was not frightened or dismayed by the death of Crafton; if anything, she was exhilarated. She had been too long the wife of a newspaperman, too long the companion of a crime writer to be spooked by something so trivial as a locked-room murder.
“We should investigate,” she said.
Futrelle smiled half a smile. “I’m sorely tempted.”
“Do you think the murderer should be allowed to get away with this?”
“Frankly, considering the victim, I’m not sure the answer to that is obvious.”
“As a good Christian, and a good citizen, you have a responsibility to put things right.”
“I know. Besides, this is damned fascinating. Why was Crafton naked, do you suppose?”
“Perhaps sleeping that way was his normal practice.”
“Possibly, but you know how cold it’s been at night, even with these electric heaters. And not just anyone could have waltzed in there-whoever-it-was needed a key.”
“That’s not difficult, Jack-simply bribe someone on staff for the key.”
“Ah, but that White Star Line staff member would eventually find out a murder had been committed in the room that key belonged to, and suddenly the killer finds himself either turned over to the law or being blackmailed from a new direction…. No, it’s more likely Crafton let his murderer into his room, of his own free will.”
May frowned and smiled at once. “Naked?”
The phone rang and made both of them jump; they laughed nervously, Futrelle saying, “Isn’t it ducky we’re taking this murder so lightly,” and picked up the phone receiver.
“Futrelle here,” he said.
“Mr. Futrelle… Captain Smith.”
He straightened, as if he were speaking to an officer-which of course he was. “Yes, Captain.”
“Could you come to see me on the bridge? I’d like a word with you.”
“Certainly.” Futrelle decided to test the waters. “Could I bring my wife along? I’m sure she’d consider it a rare honor and treat.”
“Perhaps another time. This I think should be in private. Straightaway, if you please.”
“Yes, sir.” Futrelle hung up the phone, turned to his wife, and said, “The captain wants to see me… and not you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, as my esteemed competitor’s detective is wont to say, ‘The game’s afoot.’”
The bridge, on the boat deck, was a white chamber as spartan and well-scrubbed as an operating room, attended by a brace of crisply uniformed officers, youngish men with the weathered faces their profession bestows. The row of windows onto the gray, glistening ocean and the only slightly bluer sky above gave the room an open-air effect; along those windows was a row of the porcelain-based, double-sided clockfaces of gleaming brass-trimmed, double-handle-topped engine telegraphs, and of course the wooden wheel itself, an old-fashioned instrument attached to newly fashioned technology. Looking out over the bow of the ship conveyed a certain majesty, but nowhere near the actual size of the colossal vessel.