Death in Paradise (9 page)

 

The drink made me bold. I rang Rory's room from the lobby and when she didn't answer—and I hadn't expected that she would—I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor and banged on the door. Doing it reminded me of the banging on my own door that had begun this awful day. It didn't seem like half a day had gone by. It seemed like weeks and weeks had passed, weeks during which people's stories of animosity and conflict had begun piling up at my feet like blown leaves. Weeks during which I had grown older and tireder and more cynical. So much had happened since I responded to that knock.

I stood in the hall and looked around. The hotel's opulent decor, the bird-filled lobby, the sound of fountains, and the cascades of green vines that hung over the balconies, couldn't mask the utilitarian quality of the tiers of rooms that circled the atrium center or banish the dull anonymity of all those rows of blond doors. I could hear the raucous shriek of a parrot, a disgruntled woman complaining, a tired child whining. Down the hall a maid was singing as she worked. And Rory wasn't answering. I pounded again and this time, for good measure, I announced my presence.

"And I'm not going to go away, Rory, so you might as well answer the door. Tragedy or not, we've got a conference to run." I waited a gracious minute, timing it on my watch, and knocked again. "If you don't let me in, I'll call security, claim I'm afraid you're sick or injured, and get them to open the door. You can save us both a lot of trouble by answering."

I waited. I gave her another whole minute. "Okay," I said. "You've got thirty seconds and I'm calling security."

The door flew open so violently it slammed into the wall. She stood there, red eyed and pale, her arms folded across her chest. "You are such an aggressive bitch, Thea," she said. "I was trying to rest, you know. Why can't you people leave me alone? Don't you have any idea how upset I am? How traumatic this is for me?"

"A pretty good idea," I said, walking past her into the room. Unlike her boss, she didn't have a suite. The truth is that I'm not especially sympathetic to people who collapse and stop doing their jobs. I'm from the old school, despite my tender—or as of today, not quite so tender—age. I truly believe that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. That the measure of an adult and a professional is the ability to do what has to be done, even when things are hard. That if someone throws a curve ball, you catch it anyway and throw it back twice as hard. A lot of the people I know think the tough are supposed to go shopping. Rory obviously believed the tough got to go to bed.

She leaned against the wall, arms folded defensively across her chest. "I was almost asleep," she whined. "What is it that was so important you had to wake me?"

She was doing a good job of combining aggrieved with wan and weary. A more sympathetic person probably would have bought the act, apologized, and retreated, but I needed Rory to do some work, to be doing her job like the rest of us. And there were a few things about the scenario that didn't quite ring true. Rory was wearing a long sundress of off-white linen. Sleeveless, well cut, expensive. Not the sort of thing one naps in except Victorians, fools, or those with a wait staff, irons poised. And the dress had nary a crease. Nor was the bed rumpled. Her hair was freshly washed. She was wearing perfume. And the air in her room was scented with something other than her perfume—something that smelled to me like a man's aftershave. Unless, of course, it was one of those newfangled unisex scents—part of the movement to render us all androgynous, in which case, why was she wearing two different scents? Maybe it was a trend I had missed?

I didn't think so. Plus, I'd known plenty of vain and peculiar people, but few who put on earrings and bracelets to take an afternoon nap. "I'm sorry to have to bother you like this, but I need to go over the arrangements for this afternoon and tonight," I said. "Particularly tonight. I don't want the same seating problems at the luau that we had at dinner last night. You have all that stuff on your laptop, right?"

"I don't know why I have to...." she began.

At least I'd said I was sorry; she'd never uttered a word of apology for punching and kicking and generally thrashing me earlier. If she'd accepted my apology and gone to work, I would have let it go, but she was heavily into her aggrieved role. I know all about aggrieved. My mother does aggrieved better than anyone. "You think the world has come to an end because of what happened to Martina? You think the conference and all its attendees have suddenly vanished into space?" I said. "If not you, then who? Whom? I understood that you were very eager to be a key player in all this. Martina told me you wanted to be in charge of arrangements because you wanted the experience."

"Yes. But that was before..."

"The show goes on, Rory."

"You're horrible," she snapped. "You know what Martina used to call you? The pit bull. She said once you got your teeth into something, you wouldn't let go."

"I believe the polite term is tenacious," I suggested. "Can we look at the records now? You aren't the only one who's tired, you know. Nor the only one who would like to have a nap." I didn't add, "Nor the only one who saw the body." Instead I added, "This is hard on everybody."

I thought I heard someone cough in the bathroom. I was tempted to ask if I could use her facilities, just to see her reaction, but there was work to be done. I didn't need to push her into hysterics and this morning had shown me that she could be pushed.

"Oh, all right!" She flounced over to the window, opened the curtains, then sat down at the desk and switched on her computer. I pulled up a chair and sat down beside her, noticing that her computer was just like mine. A phone rang in the bathroom. At least, it sounded like the bathroom, and since it didn't also ring in the room, it wasn't the hotel phone. Maybe it was next door or someone with a cell phone out on a balcony. Rory appeared not to have heard.

But thinking about phones reminded me of something I'd been worrying about. "How did Jeff take the news?" I asked.

"Jeff?" she said, as if unfamiliar with the name. Silly. As Martina's assistant, she'd dealt with him every day.

"You didn't call him?"

"Me? Why would I call Jeff? I assumed that the police did that."

"I thought you might have wanted to make the call yourself, since you are... were... so close to Martina, and to Jeff. I always think these calls are best coming from a friend. That's all."

"I wouldn't have been comfortable delivering such awful..." she muttered, leaning forward and concentrating on the screen.

"So the police did it. But you gave them his cell phone number."

"Why would I do that?" She turned around and glared at me, as though my suggestion that she ought to have informed Jeff Pullman about his wife's death so that he didn't get the news from an impersonal policeman was somehow bizarre and shocking and a terrible imposition on her and that it was even more outrageous that I'd expected her to provide an appropriate phone number. "I gave them the home phone."

Honestly, you'd think the woman had just come in off the farm instead of working at least eighteen months in Washington, where everyone carries a phone everywhere. They've become such a de rigueur accessory that sooner or later we're going to have fashion phones and designer phones. Sports phones, dress phones, formal-wear phones.
Oh, Thea,
I told myself,
don't get started. Stick to business.

"Because that's the only way they could reach him," I said. "Jeff is never at home during a business day, not even on Saturday. We both know that. But he's never more than an inch from his cell phone."

She shrugged. "I just didn't think of it, that's all. I gave them the first number that came to mind. I'm sure it worked just fine."

She pulled up the menu for the seminars. Most of that material was in the conference program but her screens also had details on room capacity, room arrangements, and comments on special needs. She also had a contact person listed at the hotel who was in charge of the arrangements. "Okay, there's the seminar stuff. Now are you happy?"

I wasn't sure why it was supposed to make me happy. "You've spoken with the hotel about each of these things since you arrived?"

"Of course."

I thought about the twenty-five people left standing without tables at dinner. "And the room capacities? We've got four seminars and one hundred eighty people... so you need rooms that can hold at least fifty people."

She rested wearily on her elbow and gave me a sideways look. "I assumed that the hotel would..."

"Right. But after the fiasco at dinner last night, you know you can't make that assumption. You can't make any assumptions. You have to call Mrs.... uh"—I leaned forward to check the name—"Nahman... and be sure we're in big enough rooms. It's called learning from experience. It's called anticipating."

She raised her head and thrust her chin toward the screen belligerently. "I don't know why you think you have to keep picking on me. I'm not stupid you know. I'm not a baby," she said with another flounce. "I'm a competent professional."

I'm amazed at the number of women who are accomplished flouncers. I don't know whether it comes naturally to them, or whether there was a flouncing course in junior high school that I missed. Maybe it's just that I'm tall and flouncing works better with smaller, more compact bodies. When you're five eleven, flouncing has an epic quality, a vastness that seems incongruous. Anyway, I've never done it. But Rory was a superb flouncer. She sighed aloud and rearranged herself on the chair, tapping some more keys and taking some notes on a pad.

The competent professional wasn't wearing a bra and her unusually dark nipples showed through the thin fabric. For that matter, much of her breast was exposed through the armholes as she moved around. Maybe I'd misjudged her. Maybe it was a nightgown. Maybe she really had put on a freshly pressed linen nightgown and earrings and bracelets and makeup and high-heeled sandals in the middle of the afternoon to take a nap. "Of course," I agreed. "So knowing that the hotel has screwed up once, you've checked on these... and?"

"And I haven't gotten around to it yet."

I checked my watch. "Well, you've got one hour. That's not a lot of time if they have to set up another room, post new signs...."

She yawned. "Not everyone's going to come to these anyway. We don't need that much room."

"You can't count on that. People have come a long way to attend this conference. They've been off playing all day. Now they're going to be feeling guilty and wanting to get back into a more serious mode. There may even be some local educators who've come for the day... we did issue an open invitation, didn't we?... which increases the numbers. And after what happened to Martina, we can't afford any more glitches. Things need to run smoothly."

"All right, goddamn it, you've made your point. I'll take care of it. We are not all as perfect as you are, Thea. We're not used to being up to our elbows in blood and gore. Some of us are still affected by things. Did you know that? Now, why don't you get the hell out of my room and leave me alone so I can work?"

I could hear my mother's chiding voice in my head saying, "Temper, temper," and knew if I said it it would aggravate Rory as much as it used to aggravate me. It took some willpower not to but I hadn't come here to pick a fight—even if she was being a hateful, self-centered little twit. I'd come here to do business.

"There's also the luau," I reminded her. "If you can print out the information about that for me, I can take care of those details while you check on the conference rooms."

Rory's reaction astounded me. "You're just like her," she yelled, shoving back her chair and jumping to her feet. "Just like Martina. Give me an assignment and then take it back because you don't think I can do a good job. Let me tell you something, Ms. Thea the Perfect Kozak. Martina wasn't the wonderful, competent, saintly woman you all think she was. She was mean and hateful and manipulative and a user! She didn't give a damn about real girls, just about ideas that she could use to get a lot of press. She was a drunken nymphomaniac. She was crazy as a coot." She burst into tears and fled into the bathroom.

I hoped whoever was in there was a comforting presence, since I seemed to be rather a laxative one. I sent everyone running for the john. I shook my head. Poor Rory. Here was a perfect opportunity to show the world what she could do, and how did she use it? She whined and fussed and made scenes and vanished. I slid into her chair, brought up her luau files, and printed myself copies. Then I left. Rory never reappeared.

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

I took the stairs back to my own floor to do penance for my mean behavior. It's true that under stress I can be mean and there's no denying that being confronted with a strangled body first thing in the morning was stressful. Okay. Okay. I was being too flippant. There was nothing amusing about Martina's death, particularly when every time I closed my eyes I saw her face. I was just doing my best not to think too much about it and the way I avoid the awful truths of life is work.