Death Sets Sail_A Mystery Read online

  

  DEATH

  SETS SAIL

  A Mystery

  

  Books by Dale E. Manolakas

  DaleManolakas.com

  Veronica Kennicott Series

  Hollywood Plays for Keeps A Mystery

  Death Sets Sail A Mystery

  Sophia Christopoulos Series

  Rogue Divorce Lawyer A Legal Thriller

  Lethal Lawyers A Legal Thriller

  The Gun Trial A Legal Thriller

  DEATH

  SETS SAIL

  A Mystery

  _____________________

  Dale E. Manolakas

  This mystery is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents in this mystery either are a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales in this mystery is entirely coincidental. All characters appearing in this mystery are fictitious. Any resemblance in this mystery to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  DEATH SETS SAIL

  Copyright © 2014 by Dale E. Manolakas.

  All rights reserved.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922252

  eISBN: 978-1-62805-006-6 (e-publication)

  ISBN 978-1-62805-007-3 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-62805-008-0 (Audio)

  Dedication

  In Honor of My Parents from the Greatest Generation

  I lovingly dedicate this book to my mother Betty Jane Heise Manolakas who taught me to write and with whom I enjoyed the most wonderful cruises, transatlantic and more. And with love to my late father George S. Manolakas, M.D. who, unlike his Greek ship-owning forbears on Chios, avoided the sea until World War II. Then, he crossed the Atlantic, seasick but courageous, to serve nearly four years with Patton’s Seventh and Third Armies in Africa and Europe.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank my family for their support, encouragement, suggestions, and editing of this mystery: my husband Roy L. Shults; our daughters Heather J. Manolakas, Anne C. Manolakas, and Kathleen E. Manolakas; Bob Cornez; and James Garrison. Again, thank you to my mother Betty Jane Heise Manolakas who was the first published author in our family and my father George S. Manolakas, M.D., as University of Michigan football half-back, and a dedicated surgeon, from the old school, who always put his patients first.

  I would also like to acknowledge my wonderful cruising partners: again my mother Betty Jane Heise Manolakas; Nadja Cherup, and my well-loved relatives Katherine Manolakas; and Angela and Nick Siokos. Our endless bridge games were so much fun.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  About the Author of the Mystery

  “Wouldst thou,”—“so the helmsman answered,

  “Learn the secret of the sea?

  Only those who brave its dangers

  Comprehend its mystery!”

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Prologue

  “New York is a sucked orange.”

  - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

  Thursday night in New York City, Professor Emeritus Otto Stein set two mismatched wine glasses down among the literary magazines strewn on his coffee table.

  “Damn smudges!”

  He grabbed each glass—this time by the stem—and rubbed the rim with the tail of his blue button-down shirt. Then he held each up to the nearby lamplight, filtered and dimmed by the yellowed dusty shade.

  “There!”

  As Otto re-tucked his shirt, he looked out at the wind-swept rain slapping against his sixth floor window. The tall buildings across Prince Street were checker-boarded with lit windows. The Big Apple had endured a snowy winter and a wet spring. June was no dryer; it approached the 2009 all-time record.

  However, the drenching didn’t matter to Otto tonight. Tomorrow, he was sailing away from his soggy city. He was embarking on the Queen Anne, a five-star cruise ship, on the Mystery Writers of the World transatlantic awards cruise. His trip was gratis because he was getting the coveted, world-renowned MWW Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the writing profession. He had founded and, for over half a century, chaired the New York Greenwich University writing program. His cream-of-the crop graduates were a Who’s Who of the writing world. And, over the years, he had calculatedly embedded himself in their lives.

  Otto shivered and went over to the heat of his gas-log fireplace near the door. Since his early twenties he had lived alone in this West Village, rent-controlled apartment. Now, at eighty-three, he found it colder and draftier.

  As he absorbed the warmth, he admired the mantel full of his university teaching awards, honorary trophies, plaques, and photos—photos that flaunted only his most famous graduates. With a grim, tight-lipped smile, Otto rearranged his treasures, making room for his new booty—his MWW award.

  Suddenly, the old intercom’s sputtering buzz announced Otto’s guest downstairs. He reached over.

  “Hello! You’re here?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, come up . . . come up! Sixth floor. Number 604. Take a right off the elevator. At the end of the hall . . . on the left.”

  Otto pushed the latch release for the lobby door. He shoved his packed suitcase aside on the worn wood floor. Then, he scanned the room for its guest-worthiness. To him it was presentable, especially at night when the low lighting and flickering fireplace masked its defects. His eyes stopped at the cluttered coffee table.

  “Blast it!”

  Otto rushed to his tiny galley kitchen. He returned with the missing merlot and plate of Brie with crackers. Just as he set them on the stacks of New Yorkers near the wine glasses, there was an up-tempo rap at the door.

  Otto ran his fingers through his thick, white Einsteinian hair and smoothed his wild snowy eyebrows mounding over his pewter wire-rimmed glasses. He practiced a toothy smile as he headed for the door, but paused at the mantel to move his latest and largest addition forward—an oversized Oscar mockup. The Dean and his colleagues presented it to him last month celebrating Otto’s graduate Frederick Larsen’s recent, and second, Oscar for an original screenplay.

  Otto’s gray eyes ignited with anger as he fixated on the object—his smile vanished.

  Then, a second hard knock summoned Otto.

  “Coming!” He reset his smile.

  O
tto reached over and twisted the key in his three inch brass deadbolt installed when the area, now gentrifying, had gone from good to bad. Then, he turned the brass doorknob, shiny from use.

  Suddenly, when the latch released, the door thrust open—slamming Otto full-force to the floor and banging into his suitcase. Although thin and active, age had made Otto frail. Pain shot up his back.

  Otto was stunned, limp, dazed, and disoriented.

  As the door shut, he peered through his crisscrossed glasses in a haze of confusion. Before him was a wet figure pooling water on the floor and dressed all in black—from the hooded rain coat down to black leather gloves and black umbrella. The right hand gripped Otto’s faux Oscar.

  Otto adjusted his glasses. When his gray eyes melded with the visitor’s, his confusion turned into recognition and then fear as the black figure raised the Oscar.

  “No . . . no . . . please!” resounded through the apartment.

  Otto struggled to get up, but the Oscar came down hard down on his head, splattering blood. Otto’s right arm failed to block a second blow. He fell back half-conscious, into his own blood and pooling rainwater. He rolled over and got on all fours. He fought to stand, but his shoes slipped in the pooled red mixture and his stricken arm gave way.

  The faux Oscar slammed into the back of Otto’s head. Otto collapsed unconscious and face down. The blood oozed through his wild white hair. The black figure hit him again and again, threw the Oscar down, and then left—door ajar—Merlot untouched.

  Otto was stilled.

  Forever.

  ⌘

  Chapter 1

  Anticipation and Alarm

  Friday morning in Santa Monica, California, as usual I woke to four a.m. darkness—a time when I routinely immersed myself in crime. Not committing it, but creating it. I am Veronica Kennicott, a mystery writer extraordinaire with four unpublished—but excellent—books.

  However, today, instead of writing or wrestling with my absent muse, I was waiting for an airport shuttle. I was flying to Kennedy International Airport in New York to sail on the Queen Anne for the biennial awards cruise for the Mystery Writers of the World—the MWW.

  The world-renowned awards had more than twenty coveted categories, from best unpublished mystery book to best first published literary author and even best new graphic novel. The eminent Otto Stein was getting the lifetime achievement award. The Queen Anne would carry everyone who was anyone in the literary and mystery worlds—including authors, film writers, agents, publishers, and novices.

  It was my first time going and I was excited. I had been packed for days and this morning was ready with an hour to kill. I went to my study, my writer’s lair. I booted up my laptop to productively kill time, like the rest of the world, on the Internet.

  When my screen Googled-up I was horrified. Highlighted on my home page was a murder, a murder amongst us—the MWW. Last night Otto Stein, a neighbor found the beloved patriarch of the writing world, in his New York apartment bludgeoned to death. The police called it an aborted burglary.

  Of course, I didn’t know Otto personally. But, naturally, since I was an up-and-coming writer of Southern California stature, I claimed him as my patriarch, too.

  I needed to share my shock and grief. I needed communal mourning, but blogging would not suffice. I had to “have voice” with someone.

  I speed dialed my cell for Mavis Osborne, my writing teacher and mentor for years. She was slightly older and a real professional who had made her living writing books her whole life. She was a collegial friend, even though I was as yet unpublished. She had convinced me to take this cruise at the last minute and honored me by asking me to be her roommate. I had accepted on the spot.

  ⌘

  Chapter 2

  Memento Mori

  “Mavis, it’s Veronica. I knew you’d be up.”

  Mavis had my same early morning writing routine and, besides, it wasn’t that early in New York. Mavis had flown there two days in advance with Esther Nussbaum, the longtime MWW president and cruise organizer, to help with program details. Esther was now only an intermittent mystery writer, but because of her tenure as president she rubbed elbows with every writer worth knowing.

  “Yes . . . for hours.”

  “Then you know about Otto Stein?”

  “Esther and I heard last night at dinner.”

  “Did they catch anyone yet?”

  “No, and the burglar took nothing!”

  “That’s odd.” I turned on my crime solving brain.

  “Not when a burglary goes bad and the neighbors hear it. But what’s odd to me is Otto being burgled at all! What academic has anything worth taking? I personally suspect it wasn’t a burglary, especially after reading the blogs!”

  “Really?”

  “The key is the bludgeoning. You’ll learn with more experience that a brutal murder like that is typically personal . . . very personal. I don’t like to repeat gossip . . . but it’s all over the MWW chat room and mystery blogs anyway.”

  “What is?”

  I knew Mavis well enough to know that, once encouraged, her Achilles heel was showing off, name-dropping, and unabashedly gossiping.

  “They say he had problems. His colleagues were fighting over who would get his funded university chair and some of his ex-students, like Frederick Larsen, hated him taking credit for their successes.”

  “I never heard about any of that before.”

  “And, not to speak ill of the dead, there was more to Otto than met the eye. To be honest, I never saw any evidence of it, but . . .” Mavis hesitated.

  “But what?”

  “Well . . . people are saying he was a womanizer . . . or worse!”

  “Really! At his age?”

  “The MWW chat room is buzzing. And where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.”

  “Who would have thought?” I reveled in Mavis’s professional trust.

  “But then, you know mystery writers . . . a theory around every corner. There’s the psycho unhappy-graduate scenario. Another is a disgruntled ghostwriter . . . evidently he brokered them to our colleagues with writer’s block . . .”

  “Did he?” I thought of my own prolonged writer’s block and wished I could afford a ghostwriter, or even a good editor for that matter.

  “Ghostwriters are a shameful way around writer’s block if you ask me.”

  “Of course.” My thoughts were reprimanded. “Is there any credible lead?”

  I used the word “credible” to establish my discerning crime-solving expertise.

  “Not yet. But if there is, we MWW’s will be on top of it. Otto was one of our own. I’d expect nothing less.”

  “Me neither.” I bounced to another level of elation every time she used the words we and our.

  “Such a useless tragedy. A wonderful person . . . so witty.”

  “You knew him?”

  I was thinking I should have been more solicitous about his death.

  “Of course, without him I wouldn’t be where I am today. He was a genius . . . so helpful . . . and always a gentleman to me. He was a true friend. And, Esther will tell you that the MWW would not be the powerhouse it is today but for him.”

  “I’m sorry that I won’t ever meet him.”

  “Esther and I worked most of the night replacing him in the programs and panel spots. We got Helga Brodsky and some other big names to step in. Now, of course, his Lifetime Achievement award is posthumous. We created a memorial theme for the programs . . . a celebration of his legacy. We actually got a few of his most successful graduates on the cruise, last-minute, to pay homage.”

  “Wonderful . . . for the memorial.” I was excited to be sailing with even more biggies in the authorial world, which I coveted.

  “We are a family, after all.”

  I heard the clicks of call waiting on her phone.

  “Hold on a second.” Before I could respond, Mavis relegated me to second choice in the silent world-of-hold we all inhabit—unle
ss, of course, we have the power always to be first choice. “I’m sorry. It’s Esther. I have to go. We have to get Otto’s obituary up on the MWW homepage.”

  “Wait! Did you get my email about the storm crossing our sailing route?”

  “Yes, I got Dramamine.”

  “Me too and packed extra. Do you need anything else?” We had not become fast friends yet, but I expected that to happen on the Queen Anne.

  “No, I’m ready for every contingency.” Mavis was gone.

  I was happy I had reached out to Mavis.

  * * *

  Out my bay window, the early sun burnt through the misty marine layer called “June Gloom” that spread itself as many months as it pleased. I surfed the Internet on my laptop about Otto’s death—and, of course, his life.

  Otto’s death had made our awards cruise even more newsworthy and popular. The entire community of writers was sprinting to New York at the last minute to join the cruise and commemorate his life, celebrate his death, or just have their say.

  In his twenties Otto was a teaching assistant in the Greenwich University English department and published a book—his one and only. With that one publication, his PhD in literature, and a lot of politicking, at twenty-eight he became a tenure-track professor in that same department. Soon he founded his own writing program there which grew and had produced most of the prominent writers of the last half-century. He mentored them and publicly extolled them—the successful ones, that is. In fact, it seemed they were his life—his only life.

  The long list of Otto’s graduates and other mentees topped bestseller book lists and were winners of Pulitzers, Hollywood Oscars and Emmys, New York Tonys, and some London Lawrence Oliviers.