Max Collins - The Titanic Murders

Ismay considered Futrelle’s words, then said, “So you will be discreet?”

“I have no desire for my wife and myself to be moved from our sumptuous stateroom into steerage, thank you.”

Smith smiled-just a little, but a smile. He said, “We appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Futrelle.”

“I won’t go so far as to say it’s my pleasure, Captain… but I do consider it my duty, a concept with which you’re intimately acquainted.”

They took the stairs down to C deck. Crafton’s suite was C13, which was toward the forward end of the First-Class accommodations, on the port side of the ship, down a shallow hallway off of which were only a pair of rooms on either side. In a white uniform with cap, a bulbous-nosed, white-mustached, medium-sized old gent in his early sixties stood in the hallway to one side of the door marked C13, a black bag held before him like a big lumpy fig leaf.

Pausing there at the door, the captain said, “Mr. Futrelle, this is Dr. O’Loughlin, our chief surgeon. William, this is Jacques Futrelle.”

O’Loughlin smiled, but his eyes didn’t; he said, “I understand you’re a famous author.”

It occurred to Futrelle that if he were really famous, the chief surgeon would not have to be told that.

“I’m a writer,” Futrelle said. “How was the body found, doctor?”

Ismay, looking furtively about, said, “Let’s not discuss that until we’re within the cabin, if you would, gentlemen?”

And the White Star director used a key to unlock the door, gesturing for Futrelle to go in, which he did, the other three men following.

It was a single, whitewashed oak-paneled room with a lavatory, like the Harrises’ cabin, but minus the trunk closet-a brass double bed, green horsehair sofa, marble washstand, wicker cushioned armchair, a green mesh sack on the wall taking the place of a nightstand.

The figure on the near side of the bed, which was at left upon entering, was sheet-covered; no sign of struggle, or blood.

“I stripped the bed before making my examination,” the doctor said, indicating the quilted bedspread and blankets which lay in a pile at the foot of the bed; on top of the pile sat the bed’s two fat feathered pillows, both looking used.

Futrelle prowled the room, briefly, the three men getting out of his way as he did; he found nothing unusual, nothing that seemed out of place. He did not look in drawers, however, and stopped short of an actual search.

“To answer your earlier question, Jack,” Ismay said, following him about, “Mr. Crafton was discovered this morning, just after nine o’clock, when a staff member came in to make up the room. As is common practice, the stewardess knocked, received no answer, unlocked the door and came in.”

Futrelle was examining the door. “So the body was found in this locked room?”

“Yes.”

“The door doesn’t lock without a key, does it?”

“No-it can be locked from either side, but only with a key; there’s no automatic locking device, as you do find in some hotels.”

Futrelle, excusing himself as he brushed past the captain, approached the doctor, who stood near the bedside, poised to pull back the sheet.

“If you please, Doctor,” he said.

“I warn you, sir-rigor mortis has set in.”

“I’m a big-city newspaperman, Doctor. The dead are unfortunately not strangers to me.”

The doctor nodded and drew the sheet to Crafton’s waist.

In death, the blackmailer looked no less ferretlike, though easier to pity than despise. The late John Bertram Crafton stared at the ceiling with wide, dead eyes, his mouth drawn back in a grimace.

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.”