Death in Paradise (18 page)

Time to head back. Where earlier my steps had raced to match the pace of my thoughts, now they moved slowly. I was tired. My knees hurt. My feet hurt. My head hurt. I have the unfortunate disability of getting my hangovers shortly after drinking instead of the next morning, so all that rum and sweet juice was already taking a toll. Bedtime. It had been a long hard day.

I was no longer enjoying the night. I'd pulled back from the broad focus of what was I going to do with my life to the smaller focus of what was I going to do tomorrow. There was no formal breakfast meeting but the seminars started early. I was going to monitor one on "Girls and Technology: Strategies for Hands-on Learning." Rob Greene was chairing the panel. It sounded interesting. When I got back upstairs, I had a bunch of reading to do. I always had a bunch of reading to do. Sometimes I was so envious of the people who claimed to be bored because they had nothing to do. I hadn't had a minute with nothing to do in so long. I'd love to have a chance to be bored.

Actually, this limping along on sore and tired feet was kind of boring, but I was engaged in a typical Thea Kozak maneuver—thinking about work so I wouldn't have to think about Martina's death. Thinking about Andre and what it meant to live in his world had cast my earlier reactions to Nihilani and Bernstein in a different light. Yes, they'd done typical cop things, some irritating, some manipulative, and some insulting, and yes, dealing with authority figures in situations where everything was one-sided and there was no give-and-take always rubbed me the wrong way. I admit it. I have trouble with authority.

But Nihilani and Bernstein were investigating a murder. There was no uncertainty about that. I'd been there. I'd seen what someone had done to Martina Pullman. Not a nice woman, not likeable, but someone who had had a sense of mission, and who had, in her quest for personal aggrandizement, also done wonderful things for thousands, perhaps millions, of young girls. Martina had been one of those special people who were making a difference in the world until someone appointed himself or herself as executioner and left her lying there dead, degraded, and ridiculous.

There is so much violence and death in the world today promulgated as entertainment that it's easy to lose sight of reality. Reality is that when a person dies, they stay dead. They don't pop up again tomorrow on another program, or have nine magical lives. They die and their own particular light goes out and the people who knew them and loved them and valued them are left with holes in their hearts and stories in their heads and the memories and the pain, which don't die. I know. I live with a homicide detective. My own sister was murdered. And yet I still have trouble accepting the idea that anyone can decide to kill another human being and then act on it.

Someone had killed Martina Pullman and when the police came to me for help, I didn't want to talk to them. I didn't want to tell them all the things I knew about the rest of us, about the problems we'd all had with Martina. I didn't want to get anyone in trouble. It was the completely normal reaction of an average citizen being questioned by the police. But tonight I was thinking about Andre's world, not my own. Living in his world meant looking at things from the cop's point of view. When I looked at myself through Andre's eyes, I saw a defensive, arrogant, and uncooperative woman who might be able to help refusing to do so. I saw a person who knew the inside stories not telling them because I hadn't been asked the right questions.

I didn't much like seeing myself that way. It reminded me of my meeting with Andre at the state police barracks in Thomaston, Maine. Our second meeting, when he was the detective investigating my sister's death. Even as my mind veered in that direction, I tried to turn it aside. There are some things I don't like to remember. Like learning how my sister, Carrie, had died.

I could still see him sitting behind that desk. I heard his voice as clearly as if it were yesterday. We'd been arguing about the very explicit questions he'd been asking about Carrie. Questions I thought were intrusive and uncalled for when applied to my baby sister.

"I'm going to speak very frankly," he said, "so that you can understand. Murder isn't nice. It isn't polite, and murderers are not respectful of people's feelings. The unfortunate but necessary result is that murder investigations aren't nice either. Murder victims don't have a right to privacy. The killer takes their privacy when he takes their life. We need to know as much as possible about the victim to help us know where to look." Then he'd pulled out the pictures. "Do you know how your sister died?"

More than two years had passed and still, when I thought of him reaching for those pictures, I went cold all over. For a long time, the Carrie of those pictures had come to me in dreams. I hurried on, trying to keep them from coming back now. Instead I saw Helene Streeter, my old friend Eve Paris's mother, slashed to death on the street in front of her house, trying to hold her gaping wounds together as she crawled toward her own front door. She smiled when she saw me. "Thea..." She held out a hand, dripping blood. You can't close your eyes on the pictures inside your head.

I started to run. An incongruous, desperate escape from all the dead people inside my skull. The path that had seemed so warm and inviting when I started out now seemed punishingly hard and endless. But running helped. It's hard to think when you're gasping and hurting. I ran past moonlight strollers, ignoring their stares, until I was back in the brightly lit lobby. I punched the elevator button, doing an impatient little shuffle while I waited.

Upstairs, I fastened all the locks on my door and closed the curtains against the night. Then I turned on the television, looking for a movie to distract me. Drivel. Trash. Junk. Crap. News. Sitcom. Wait. I went back to the news. Nihilani, looking no more animated on camera than he had in person. The reporter was asking him questions. The first was whether they had any suspects. Nihilani replied that the investigation was ongoing. The reporter said the rumor was there was no sign of forced entry, did that mean the killer was probably known to the victim? Nihilani was noncommittal. So it went for several more questions. The police had no comment other than their opinion that there was not a killer running rampant among Maui's tourist hotels and there was no reason for people to be alarmed.

As news stories went, it was typical, uninformative, and boring. And not particularly reassuring. I was about to turn it off when it switched to a picture of Jeff Pullman arriving at the airport. Disheveled, which Jeff never was, wearing dark glasses, his shoulders bowed with grief, waving off reporters with a choked "No comment."

My heart went out to him. I remembered those stunned days after we heard the news about Carrie. Planning for her funeral. Choosing a casket. Packing up her apartment. The pain of touching her things, smelling her perfume, seeing her handwriting, wrapping up the bits of jewelry we'd given her as gifts.

I remembered getting the phone call about my husband, David, summoning me to the hospital. Going there, reaching out and touching his body, still warm yet with his spirit gone. I remembered my screaming agony back home in an apartment where I was completely surrounded by his things. I'd spent the whole night curled up in a corner, clutching his pillow, disbelieving, waiting for morning and light and someone to come and tell me it wasn't true. How morning had come and it was still true. David, my husband, the love of my life, was gone and he wasn't coming back and all the wishing in the world couldn't make it so.

If there was anything I could do to help make Jeff Pullman's world right again, anything I could tell the police that might help find the person who inflicted this hurt on him, who had willfully eliminated Martina and left her for the world to mock, I had to do it.

Nihilani had thoughtfully left me his card. I picked up the phone and called him.

 

 

 

Chapter 13

 

Nihilani wasn't available. All they'd tell me was that they'd have him call. I waited by phone for a while. When you're ready and willing to spill your guts, not that I had very much to spill, you want to get it over with while the momentum is still there. After an hour, knowing I had another busy day ahead, I gave up, put on my nightgown, and went to sleep. Between the long run and the long walk, I hoped I'd get lucky and I wouldn't dream. For good measure, I took a nice sleepy-time analgesic for the sore knees and feet and it was like rolling off the edge of the earth.

I woke to a pounding on the door so similar to the way the day had begun that I expected to find Rory in the corridor again. In my stunned state, I even expected she'd be taking me to see Martina. With a bleary brain directing my numb fingers, I fumbled with all the locks and finally I got the door open, raising my arm to protect my eyes from the corridor lights. Nihilani and Bernstein stood there, looking dead on their feet.

"Sorry," I said stupidly. "I was asleep."

It was Bernstein's stare that alerted me to the inappropriateness of my costume. My favorite nightgown. A slip of white cotton gauze, plain except for the million buttons down the front. Andre bought it. He likes to undo the buttons. On TV, people always have their robes laid carefully across the feet of their beds for just such emergencies. But Andre is wiggly. Even if I wore a robe, which I don't unless I'm visiting or in a hotel, and even if I did leave it on the foot of the bed, it would be knocked on the floor or churned into the mass of covers long before the fire broke out or the burglar needed to be chased away. So I had to dig through the suitcase. When I found the matching robe, I snatched it up and put it on. It wasn't much, but at least two layers of gauze were better than one.

They took the two chairs, dropping into them wearily. It was 2:00 a.m. and they'd been on the case almost twenty hours. "Sandwiches and coffee?" I suggested, passing the menu to Bernstein. He took it, studied it, and handed it to Nihilani. They gave me their orders and I phoned them in to room service.

We all sat and stared at each other. The silence in the room was leaden. I thought I should have invited them to lie on the bed and sleep. It was one of those king-sized beds. I always feel strange sleeping alone in something half an acre across. Not that I would have invited them to sleep with me. After my earlier outburst with Nihilani, that would have been impolitic. It was just that they looked so tired, and I had a soft spot for tired, hardworking guys. There had been days, when Andre was working flat out on a homicide, when I'd have to literally steer him toward the bed, and he was asleep before I could pull off his shoes.

"It could have waited till morning," I said. I wondered which of them would take charge. I had a feeling that I belonged to Nihilani.

But it was Bernstein who spoke. "First twenty-four hours," he said. The whites of his eyes were red. His lanky frame drooped in the chair like someone had laid a garment bag over it and the bag had sagged to fit the shape of the chair. The lines beside his mouth were deeper and his skin had a pale, dry look. He needed a shave. "So, what changed your mind?"

"Andre."

Bernstein shrugged and looked at Nihilani. "You know. The boyfriend," Nihilani said. "Cop. State cop. Detective."

"So he told you to cooperate?" Bernstein asked.

I shook my head. "He's working a case. Just like you guys. No. I was thinking about what he'd think of me, if he was in your position." I shrugged. "I didn't like it much." My eyes wanted to close again. Not even the shock of a sudden awakening and two strangers in my room were enough to jar me into wakefulness. The analgesic must have had some weird stuff in it. That coffee had better get here fast.

"And then I started thinking about my sister, Carrie. She was murdered a few years ago. That's how I met Andre. He was the investigating detective." I didn't know why I was telling them all this—my censor faculties must have been asleep—but having come this far, I might as well tell all. "So I know how it feels to lose someone you love. Lose. That's a stupid way of putting it. I know how it feels to have someone you love murdered. I know how it felt when people knew stuff about Carrie that they weren't telling the police. Then, on the news, I saw Jeff Pullman. He looked so sad and I thought that if there was anything I could do to help, I ought to."

They were staring at me like I was a Martian. People did that a lot. Maybe when I talked I was funny looking or my nose bobbed up and down. One of those things we don't see when we look in the mirror. "Why are you guys staring?" They dropped their eyes like an invisible commander had given an order, so that now they were both staring at their shoes. I waited. No one said anything. Oh, hell, I knew better than to wait for an answer. Cops don't talk. They ask.

Finally Nihilani said, "So, what did you want to tell us?" He sounded like he expected to be bored out of his mind. I excused him because he also sounded the way people do when they're too tired to move their mouths anymore.

"Last night... I mean Friday night... the night before Martina was... look, maybe I'd better back up and tell you about an assumption I've made..."