Free Mr. Monk Gets on Board by Hy Conrad Page B

together, and she walked me back up to level five.
    “It’s hard to believe the railing actually broke,” I said. I was anxious to try to shift the blame away from the human factor.
    I was reassured to see Mariah nodding in agreement. “We had a technician check out the balcony. Four of the six bolts that held the railing in place were gone, no sign of them on the upper balcony or lower. He couldn’t tell if they’d just been stripped away by the fall from wear and neglect, or whether they’d been removed.”
    “Removed?” I was shocked. “What do you mean,
removed
? By a person?”
    “We sent technicians to check all the balconies on the four hundred level. We called it a standard maintenance check. Four other balconies had the same problem, railings held in place by just a bolt or two. Accidents waiting to happen. Think of it: a young couple posing against a loose railing or a kid swinging on one? We were lucky Mr. McGinnis didn’t clear the lower balcony and hit the ocean.”
    “So it’s almost a good thing,” I said. “McGinnis wasn’t killed, and you can repair the other balconies.” I was trying to put a positive spin on Monk’s ridiculous stunt.
    “A good thing?” Mariah smiled. “I admire your optimism, Natalie.” And this coming from one of the most optimistic people I’d ever met.
    “Maintenance failures can turn out a lot worse—you have to admit.”
    “If it was a failure.”
    “Are you saying this might have been deliberate?” I asked. “Someone sabotaging the ship?”
    “Well, we’re checking the other levels, and we’ve found no problem. Not so far. Everything is tightly bolted and shipshape, so to speak. It was just on level four.”
    “Why would anyone do that?”
    “I don’t know,” said Mariah. “Maybe it’s my imagination. But the last thing this old tug needs is a death or a lawsuit. Oops, sorry. I didn’t mean that about the old tug. We keep a very well-maintained ship.”
    “It’s a lovely ship.”
    “It’s not. But thanks for saying so.” We had reached level five, where I turned left toward my cabin. She was turning right. “I’m glad it wasn’t your friend,” she added. “The person who fell.”
    “Me, too. Believe me.”
    I opened the door to cabin 555, ready to tell Monk both the good news—he wasn’t solely responsible for sending Darby McGinnis flying through the railing—and the intriguing not-so-good news that perhaps someone else was.
    I found him in bed, the one that wasn’t mine, lying straight on his back on top of the covers, still tightly bound in his orange life vest. He was sound asleep.
    And snoring.

   CHAPTER NINE
    Mr. Monk Gets Picked Up
    T he good thing about a breakfast buffet is that you can have a leisurely meal in approximately six minutes. At least I can when I’m hungry. And a morning full of surprise and anxiety had been enough to work up an appetite. I left Monk in his room (also known as my room), walked up to the restaurant deck, had my leisurely breakfast, and still got down to the conference center in time for the first seminar.
    The moderator was a senior lecturer from the Stanford Business School, and the topic was “Business Branding.” I had circled this one in red on my schedule, an absolute must. How could I make Monk and Teeger the go-to PI firm for all things impossible and mysterious? I didn’t want to turn our image into that of a
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
, but that’s essentially what we wanted. No divorces, no guilty clients, no corporate espionage. But if you or your company has some completely inexplicable mystery, then we’re your guys. I took a few pages of notes and asked a few smart questions.
    Toward the end of the session—“Any final questions?”—I raised my hand again and found myself beat out by someone in the back.
    “Yes,” came a male voice. At first I didn’t turn around. “What is the best way to manage word of mouth? What do you think is the single best way to