The Lusitania Murders by Max Allan Collins Page A

virtue. . . . No indeed.”
    “The ringleader,” she said breathlessly.

    Klaus, the burly blonde stowaway—still in his stolen stewards’ whites—lay on his side on the shining linoleum, his blue eyes staring at nothing, his expression one of disappointment and surprise . . . a common enough one, at the point of death, I should think. Who among us won’t be naively disappointed, and bitterly surprised, when the inevitable arrives?
    She sealed herself within her quarters, and I returned to the body. At this time of the morning, the corridor was otherwise deserted. Kneeling over the man, I noticed a wound in his back, a blossom of crimson, still dripping.
    I remembered the vague sense that there’d been a commotion outside the stateroom—that had been, after all, what stirred me from my slumber. I’d quickly dressed and exited, so if that commotion indeed had resulted in the violent death of the blonde stowaway, this was a freshly created corpse . . . born within the past ten minutes or less.
    Proving that a woman could indeed dress as quickly as a man (should the situation call for it), Miss Vance emerged in a simple blue-gray gingham morning dress—well, this was morning, after all—with collar and cuffs of dotted lawn and a rather loose skirt. She looked nothing like any detective I ever heard about.
    Or such was the case until she knelt next to me, eyes narrowed, unhesitant to achieve a close proximity to the corpse.
    “Have you touched anything?” she asked.
    “Somehow I managed to resist. Is that a bullet wound?”
    She leaned in, her pretty nose damn near touching the blossom of blood. Then she drew back, her eyes meeting mine and holding them. “No—that’s a knife wound. Possibly a hunting knife—judging by the width of the tear in the fabric . . . nearly two inches.”

    “Couldn’t the cloth have been torn in the struggle?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t believe there was a struggle—this is the classic example of a man stabbed in the back.”
    I disagreed—telling her I had heard a to-do in the hall. Surely this was the result of a scuffle escalating into tragedy.
    She shrugged. “Perhaps there were two other men . . . two assailants, let us say. One is arguing with our late friend here, facing him, and the other is behind him.”
    “I see—one keeps him busy, the other stabs him in the back.”
    “Or one is arguing with the victim, and as the argument seems about to get out of hand, the accomplice ends the discussion with a two-inch blade of steel.”
    She stood and so did I.
    “Of course,” she said, “what immediately comes to mind is his two friends—the other stowaways.”
    “Yes! If Klaus escaped the cell, so must have the others—and there was tension between them . . . I witnessed it.”
    Nodding, she said, “The other two seemed more likely to cooperate, to talk—wasn’t that your opinion, after interrogating them?”
    “It most certainly was. . . . Shouldn’t we alert Staff Captain Anderson, or perhaps Captain Turner himself?”
    “We should. But I’d like a few moments, here, at the scene of the crime. . . before too many well-meaning fools come tromping through.”
    I was doubtful this was wise. “We may have two stowaways at large, remember—one of whom is armed with a hunting knife.”
    “Van, I scarcely think they’ll be trying to take over theship with it—they are probably seeking a new hiding place, not looking for another victim.”
    Miss Vance requested that I stand near her doorway, and she returned to her quarters and emerged moments later with a magnifying glass.
    I had to laugh. “How Sherlock Holmes of you!”
    “What may seem a cliche in Conan Doyle,” she said, “is a valuable tool in real detection. . . . Physical evidence has put many a guilty neck in the hangman’s noose.”
    The detective in gingham knelt to examine the linoleum in the area of the corpse, an activity that took several seemingly endless