Death in Paradise (5 page)

A gasp and cry made me look sideways. A plump, pleasant-faced woman, with big, brassy hair was standing on the next balcony, staring. "Get help!" I said. "Call security and get someone up here!" She continued to stare at us, unmoving, as though we were staging this. "Stop staring and do something." I was yelling now. "Please. This is an emergency! Get someone up here to help me before she jumps." Or before Rory successfully bruised me from head to toe. The woman retreated, still staring, bumped off the wall, and disappeared inside. I could only hope she was calling for help and not writing her exciting adventure down in her vacation diary.

I'd never had such a vivid understanding of the expression, "having your hands full." I sure did. Rory was slight but no weakling, and she squirmed in my grasp like an eel within the slippery fabric of her shapeless black sack. It was like wrestling with my brother, Michael, when we were kids. Like Michael, she didn't follow any of the rules of fair play, and I was taking quite a beating. I was trying to be calm and uncombative, but if she went for my nose, I'd let her jump. I knew from personal experience there was little more painful or unaesthetic than a broken nose.

Finally I got her pinned against the railing, freed one hand, and slapped her hard. "Snap out of it," I ordered. She swore at me. I slapped her again.

She went limp, cowering against the railing, her hand on her face. She raised stricken eyes. "You hit me," she said. "You hit me."

"What do you think you've been doing? Dancing a jig?"

At that moment help arrived in the form of a couple security men, two cops, including the big cop, Nihilani, and the goggling woman from next door. Better late than never. "I won't tell them anything," Rory whispered, cowering against my side. "No one needs to know."

I explained the situation as briefly as possible, happy to hand Rory—reduced now to a limp, sobbing lump—over to professionals. I recommended sedatives and a physician and collapsed in my chair, head in hands. Eyes closed. Ten minutes left to prepare a speech, and I felt like I'd just been poured out of a cocktail shaker.

I heard the door open and shut. Heard someone still moving around the room. Looked up. The big cop was coming out of the bathroom with a glass in his hand. He held it out to me. I took it, sipped it, set it down. My hands were still shaking. I closed my eyes again.

"Scary, huh?" he said. I heard the creak of springs as he sat on the bed. Looked over at him. He was pulling out a notebook, wearing that 'ready-to-talk' look.

"Not now," I said. "I can't talk to you right now. We've got a breakfast meeting in ten minutes and I have to give the speech."

"We're investigating a murder," he said.

"And I'm not being uncooperative. I'm just trying to keep a hundred and eighty more people from getting hysterical. After breakfast, I'm all yours. I'm not going anywhere. I'm trying to keep this conference from falling completely apart. I'm dying to do my job. Just like you." It sounded more defensive than I'd meant it to, but I couldn't help it.

"I could keep you here," he said. His cool, unblinking stare was faintly reptilian.

"Of course you could. I'm hoping you won't." I tried to smile but my face, battered by Rory's fists, and my disposition, battered by the whole morning, wouldn't cooperate. The result, reflected in the mirror across the room, was tentative and pathetic.

He snapped his notebook shut and looked pointedly at his watch. "How long?"

"Hour. Hour and a half."

"Ten o'clock. Back here. You're mine."
Not in a million years am I yours, buddy,
I thought. "Deal," I said. "Now, if you don't mind, I could use a few minutes by myself."

He stood up, turned toward the door. A crisp, military turn. Turned back, slightly less crisp. "You okay?" he asked.

I tend, with cops, to be stand-offish and stoic, but I know they like you better if you act like a proper victim, so I told the truth. "I'm not sure. I feel shaky... and... uh... battered."

"I'll bet she was a handful," he said. "Why you?" I shrugged. My shoulder hurt. And time was rushing past so fast I could feel the seconds slip away. "I'm everyone's mother, I guess."

The heavy features lifted in something like a smile. "Some mother," he said. "Catch you later."

Five minutes to speech time. Oh, well. I could be a little late to breakfast. Nothing ever starts on time. I might just make it—if I didn't eat but spent the time reading. I didn't feel very hungry. And anyway, wasn't I the one who said life was no fun without challenges?

 

 

 

Chapter 3

 

Breakfast went well. We tiptoed adeptly through a minefield and emerged without getting blown up thanks to Jolene's calm grace, Shannon's hearty bonhomie, and Zannah's surprisingly moving eulogy. We compromised with Rob Greene and attributed Martina's demise to "mysterious circumstances under investigation." I tap-danced briskly through my part, internally thanking my demanding lawyer father and a brutal college speech teacher for giving me the tools to think on my feet. Good mentoring and seven years in the field were beginning to pay off. I might not have been the world's most eloquent speaker, but the subject was familiar enough so I didn't have to read it word for word, and people didn't fiddle and chat or get that bored, glassy-eyed look speakers recognize as the kiss of death.

Afterward, I was mobbed with people who had questions, or wanted copies of the speech, or wanted to get together for some follow-up. Shannon waded through the crowd to command my presence at a lunch meeting, claiming she and Jolene and Zannah needed to talk further about damage control. Several people handed me business cards with scribbled messages on the back. Others tried to get me to give them the inside scoop on what had happened. I was relieved that things had gone well and wished I could have stayed and talked, but I was late for my date with the detective, and getting nervous about keeping him waiting. He hadn't struck me as the understanding type.

I was making a beeline for the door when someone grabbed my arm. I don't like being grabbed under any circumstances and this was particularly unpleasant as the grabber managed to hit several spots already bruised in my wrestling match with Rory. I turned to find that the hand belonged to Lewis Broder. "Thea," he whispered, "we need to talk."

"Not now, Lewis. I'm late for a meeting."

"With the cops, right?" I nodded. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I know you saw me last night. With Martina?" I nodded again. "Don't tell them about it, okay?"

Obviously Lewis hadn't seen my inquisitor and didn't know what I was up against. "I won't volunteer it, but if they ask a direct question, I won't lie to them, Lewis."

The hand gripped tighter. "Thea... you've got to... you know how it is... I'm a married man. Besides, nothing happened...."

I shook him off and took a step backward. "If nothing happened, you've got nothing to worry about. Look, I've got to go."

He must have missed my displeasure completely, because he gave me a professionally charming smile. "Remember," he called after me. "Mum's the word." I recalled no such agreement and was not charmed, but I restrained myself from making a rude gesture at his departing back.

Much of the group left for tours of the Napali coast or Mt. Haleakala. We had been told by those experienced in conference management that these things worked best when the conferees were given part of the day to go out and play, with substance in the morning or afternoon, with the other half of the day off, so that was the model we were using. I, being adventurous, or at least determined to get out of the hotel once while I was there, had signed myself up for the twenty-mile bike tour down the mountain on Sunday morning. Now, it was only Friday, and if I didn't get some sun and unconditioned air, I was going to go bonkers.

On the other hand, I had a hot date who would be waiting for me in my room. Hot to grill me, at least. Now that the speech was over, I felt a kind of depleted weariness. Maybe eating would have helped but I didn't feel at all hungry. I'd settled for juice and water and half a piece of toast. A chaise in the sun would have been heavenly. Instead, I trundled upstairs to do my civic duty.

My mother used to have an expression, Let George do it, she used when she was tired of the endless tasks. Of course there never was a George, but increasingly, as my life seemed full to overflowing, I wished there were. I would love to have sent George upstairs to deal with the waiting cop.

He was standing outside my door, arms folded across his chest, leaning against the railing. Stolid, placid, official. Something Andre had said popped into my head, a bit of loverly advice. "Don't drive like you do in Massachusetts, Thea. Those Hawaiian cops are tough." This guy certainly looked tough. He stood up straighter when he saw me and acknowledged my presence with a nod. Only a nod, no words, not even a grunt. It was disconcerting. Unsettling. He stared, he nodded, he didn't speak.

I opened the door and he followed me in, settling himself in a chair without asking my permission. His looming bulk made the room seem small. The still-unmade bed and my scattered papers made it seem cluttered. I felt claustrophobic. I opened the door to the lanai and warm air streamed in. I wanted to spread my arms and close my eyes and embrace it, but not in front of this hulking policeman.

It was odd, the impression he gave of being big and bulky. Andre is a big guy. A shade over six feet and solid, with big shoulders and a wide chest and strong arms and legs. This guy wasn't much taller, but he would have made Andre look slight. He filled the chair and gave off a primitive aura of strength and power. He made me feel as tiny as Tinker Bell when I often feel big as an ox.

I sat down in the other chair, kicked off my shoes, curled my legs up underneath me, and waited. He opened his notebook, clicked his pen, and nodded. "Tell me about Martina Pullman," he said.

I said the name to myself and contemplated where to begin. Physical? Domestic? Official? What did I know about Martina, really, that he might need to know? That mattered to this case? He was watching me intently, a look that invaded my personal space the way some people do when they stand too close. I lowered my eyes. It's not easy to back away from a look. "I don't know what you want to know," I said. "We were sort of co-workers, I suppose. At least insofar as we were both working for the National Association of Girls' Schools. She is... was... the executive director. I'm a board member and I've done some consulting work for—"

"Tell me about this conference," he interrupted. "What's it all about?"

"Making the case for single-sex education for girls."

He looked surprised. "This conference is about sex education?"

I shook my head, trying not to smile. I didn't think he had much of a sense of humor. "Single-sex education. Girls' schools or all-girl classes. No boys. We're talking about the ways girls do better when they're in classes with other girls, the way their confidence grows, the way they discover their voices. We're talking about encouraging and mentoring girls so that they can take an equal place in science and engineering, in physics and math. Did you know that only about ten percent of physicists, and the same number of architects in AIA, are women? And this is after twenty years of struggle?" Another nod.
Get off your soapbox, Thea,
I reminded myself.
This isn't what he wants to hear.

"We're talking about educational issues as they relate specifically to girls. Whether girls have different learning styles, different learning needs, how girls approach technology—"

"Okay. I got it. What was your relationship to the deceased?"

The deceased. That had an aura of finality, didn't it? Not even seeing her lying there, ugly as it was, had made her seem as dead as his dropping her name and using the generic "deceased" instead. The words seemed to hang in the air between us; he was here because of the "deceased." Because Martina was dead. Ungracefully, embarrassingly, grotesquely dead. I knew too much about dead. It was final. Irrevocable. And hard to comprehend.

I swallowed and forced myself to answer the question. "Professional," I said. "I'm a partner with the EDGE Consulting Group. We do a lot of work for independent, that is private, schools, on admissions issues, management issues, image and perception, crisis management." He was nodding but not writing anything down.

"The National Association of Girls' Schools came to us as a client, looking for some basic research and marketing—"

"And Martina Pullman was director of the association?" he interrupted.

"Yes. Basically she started it. It was her baby."

"What was she like?"

"Smart. Very smart. She was a real quick study; had an amazing ability to master the necessary facts very quickly and speak about them articulately. She was superb at getting press, at attracting media attention to the group, to our issues. She had a vision, a sense of mission, that was inspiring to all of us."

He clapped his hands together twice in slow-mo imitation of applause and I felt my face getting hot. "What was she like as a person? What was she like to work with? Was she difficult? Beloved? Detested?"