Death on the Mississippi (5 page)

“Dalton says we're all to go to the ballroom,” Pan said breathlessly as she tried to regain her wind. “He has something to show us.”

“Does Dalton say who's to supervise this fucking job while we play his damn games?” Sam said.

Pan hooked the foreman's arm in hers as she led him up the path toward the large building. “Oh, Sam, you're such a grizzly bear.”

The southerly wall of the ballroom was mostly glass, with sliding panels that opened out onto a wide veranda that overlooked Long Island Sound. The ceiling was a maze of molded figure reliefs, many parts of which had broken off and fallen to the cluttered floor. The walls were water stained, and plaster, leaves, and old newspapers littered the floor.

The restoration was well under way. Scaffolding reached high up the walls and contained several painters who were carefully chipping and sanding the orante molding. Lyon noticed that several of the younger workers had Walkman radios either hooked to their belts or sitting nearby. Luckily they used earphones so that the sound of heavy-metal rock was mercifully absent.

“This is my favorite room in the whole resort,” Pan said. “Later I'll show you the decorator's drawings of what it will look like when it's finished.”

Sam Idelweise began to impatiently riffle through a sheaf of blueprints. “Where's laughing boy?” he muttered.

“I'll go get him,” Pan said and hurried out.

“Oh, my God!” It was a strangulated gasp from one of the men working near the ceiling. The young painter scrambled down the ladder. He wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt, paint-splattered, cutoff jeans, and carried a blaster with an earplug. He reached the bottom of the ladder and faced them with a look of horror on his face. “It's coming! Jesus, they're finally on their way.”

Sam scowled at the young worker. “No breaks for the second coming, Harold. You wait for lunch like everyone else.”

Harold ripped the earplug from his head and threw it at Idelweise. His mouth opened and closed several times before words were articulated. “I don't care what you say. It doesn't matter anymore. Don't you understand? The missiles are on their way!”

“What in the hell are you talking about?” Idelweise shot back.

“It's all on the radio. Listen!” Harold turned up the set's volume.

All work stopped as a sonorous announcer's voice filled the ballroom. “The Pentagon has verified that countless missiles have been launched from areas throughout the Soviet Union. Early-warning satellites indicated that this occurred sixteen minutes ago.” The announcer's hysteria was becoming obvious and beginning to affect everyone in the ballroom.

“Civil Defense officials recommend that everyone stay away from windows and … It doesn't matter what you do, it's all over. This is the end.”

The broadcast abruptly terminated.

Sam Idelweise strode purposely across the room. “No way! No way, José, do I believe this shit.” His booted foot lashed out and smashed into the radio.

The appliance's owner looked dispassionately down at the ruined set and shook his head. “It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.”

Sam shook the young painter by the shoulders. “Snap out of it, kid. That bastard Dalton is up to another of his …”

Everyone in the room froze in a silent tableau as the blinding light outside the window cascaded through the room in one gigantic flash.

“Mother of God,” Sam said. “That was New York City.”

“We have New York City a hundred twenty miles away to the south and Boston the same distance to the north,” Lyon said. “And we're only twenty miles from New London, where the Electric Boat Company, the sub base, and the Coast Guard Academy are located.”

“I don't think I need a geography lesson, Wentworth,” Bea said huskily.

“We're history,” Sam said.

“I love you, Lyon,” Bea said as she wound her arms around him.

4

A bright light flashed again and then again.

“Perfect. Absolutely perfect,” Dalton Turman said from the doorway. “It has exceeded my fondest dreams.” The flash on his Polaroid camera winked again.

Sam Idelweise blinked. “What?”

“As I would have expected,” Dalton said. “The Wentworths are locked in a final embrace while Idelweise is standing there looking dumb. Harold, I do believe you have wet your pants.” The flash blinked again. “Now, there's an interesting reaction.” He turned the camera toward a corner of the room. The girl's brimmed painter hat had fallen to the floor and her long hair, released from its bondage, fell down her back. She was locked in the embrace of a young male painter. His hands tore at her blouse, while her fingers under his shirt clawed at his back as she pressed against him. “Smile for the birdy, Bambi, honey,” Dalton said as he snapped another picture and laughed. “Now you can go ahead and finish.”

Sam reached into a large toolbox to pick up a hammer. “I'm going to kill the son of a bitch!” He started toward Dalton, who turned and ran from the room.

“Stop them, Lyon!” Bea said in alarm.

When Lyon reached the outside of the building, Dalton was halfway down the path leading to the water. Sam was not far behind and seemed to be gaining. The construction foreman bellowed and waved the hammer over his head.

Dalton reached the water steps ahead of Sam, and without breaking stride, ran into the bay and dove. He swam twenty strong strokes before turning to tred water.

Sam stood waist-deep in the water with the hammer still raised. Lyon reached for the weapon. “Easy, Sam.” Idelweise snatched the hammer away with a glare.

“I knew the bear couldn't swim,” Dalton called. “Uhoh.” He quickly ducked underwater as the hammer arced through the air and landed where his head had been.

“I swear to God, I'm going to get that sucker,” Sam said before he stomped from the water and back toward the main building.

Dalton surfaced and waved at Lyon. “Get my camera, will you? And have Bobby take the boat out a hundred yards with everyone aboard except Sam. I'll meet you guys out there.”

“That man should be quarantined on an uninhabited island,” Bea said as she climbed aboard the houseboat.

“Do you know where Bobby is?” Lyon asked as he followed his wife aboard.

“They told me he was on board. Let's look in his stateroom.”

They walked through the main saloon and back toward the rooms. The last door was slightly ajar. There was a couple on the bunk.

Katrina Loops did not have on her string bikini, in fact neither she nor Bobby Douglas wore anything. Lyon and Bea quickly turned and hurried back down the hall but not before they were viewed with alarm by the embracing couple.

“Wait!” Katrina rushed down the companionway after them, wrapping a large terry-cloth towel around her large frame as she ran. She clutched at Bea's arm. “Please don't say anything to anyone. Please.”

“We didn't intend to,” Bea answered.

She turned to Lyon. “He'd kill me if he thought I was doing it with anyone else.” The woman had momentarily lost any vestiges of sophistication, and had reverted to a teenager's fear of authority.

“Not a word,” Lyon promised.

She looked at each of them a moment, clutched the towel tightly around her neck, and then hurried back down the hall.

“I have questions,” Bea said when they were seated on deck under the awning. “Would Sam have bludgeoned Dalton to death if he had caught him during that wild chase?”

“The way I read Sam, he would have beaten the hell out of Dalton, but not killed him.”

“Maybe true over the practical joke,” Bea said. “But in other areas I'm not so sure.”

“My question,” said Lyon, “is, if Katrina is so concerned about Dalton finding out she's having an affair with Bobby, why in the hell do they do it in the middle of the day on Dalton's boat with the door open?”

“I think she wanted Pan to walk in on them,” Bea said.

“Ah, that was the game plan.”

“An ancient method of hiding the real reason for suspicion,” Bea said.

“What have you heard about Douglas? I don't believe Dalton's story about running drugs.”

“Pandora tells me that he's a ranked tennis player and will be the pro here at the resort when it opens. He's crewing this barge only until his leg tendon mends. Let's see if we can find a drink. I need something to help me recover from World War Three.”

Dalton changed clothes, but not before closing the drapes in the main saloon and insisting that they all sit Indian fashion on the floor. No one commented on the unorthodox seating, but they all knew that it gave them protection from possible gunfire.

“Isn't anyone going to talk to me?” Dalton asked.

“No one wants to talk to you and Sam wants to kill you,” Pan said. “Bambi was so embarrassed that she ran off the job crying hysterically that the only reason she tried to do it was because she didn't want to die a virgin.”

“What!” Dalton yelled. “Bambi was a virgin? Why wasn't I told? I would have demanded the right of
droit du seigneur
. Where's my camera?”

“I threw it in the water! You jerk!”

Dalton smiled bitterly. “That wasn't a very nice thing for Miss Conviviality to do.”

“Oh, stop it! I was never Miss Conviviality and you know it. The only votes I ever got were from my high-school football team when they selected me as Miss Community Chest, and I'll leave that one to your imagination.”

“That was a convincing trick you played on us,” Lyon interjected to relieve tension. “How did you do it?”

Dalton preened. “One out-of-work actor, a tape recorder, and some radio equipment from Radio Shack. That was the easy part. It took me three nights' work to get the magnesium placed properly outside the ballroom. Synchronizing its explosion with a trigger device was a little complicated, but worth it. If you could only have seen your faces … You really shouldn't have destroyed my camera, Pan. That's a no-no.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“At least my friends appreciate me,” Dalton said as he smiled at Bea.

Pan went rigid. Her fists clenched as she stood angrily before her husband. “Your friends! You don't have any friends. The Wentworths are practically the only people left on this planet who will give you the time of day. And they only see you once a year and during that time you succeed in doing perfectly dreadful things to them.”

“It will only cost a couple of hundred dollars to repair the holes in the kitchen wall that Rocco made,” Bea said.

“And even Lyon would probably hit you if he wasn't so grateful over that business during the war,” Pan continued.

“What war was that?” Katrina asked.

“
The War
is always the one the men present fought in,” Bea said.

“That time-sharing business doesn't sound so bad,” Lyon said in a valiant attempt to change the direction of the conversation. “Katrina gave us the full sales pitch, and the ability to swap units for a week anywhere in the world does sound intriguing.”

Dalton harumphed. “Sure, if you care for Timbuktu in the dead of winter, or if high summer in Death Valley grabs you.”

“No one can be that cynical,” Katrina said with a laugh.

“It has nothing to do with cynicism,” the developer said. “I call it reality orientation, survival of the fittest, or as the bumper sticker on my Mercedes says, ‘He who has the most toys at the end wins.'”

As Bobby Douglas gently docked the
Mississippi
on the river across from Nutmeg Hill, they saw a heavyset man in a business suit standing impatiently on the lip of the ancient pier. He had taken off his suit jacket and had it hooked over his shoulder with his finger as a foot tapped the planking. His whole body seemed to will a faster progress of the houseboat's mooring.

“Why do I have this strong feeling that Mr. Dice wishes to have words with me?” Dalton asked.

“Because I can tell by the way he's acting that you've screwed him again, darling,” Pan answered sweetly.

“Yonder impatient man is Randy Dice, my partner and chief financial officer,” Dalton said to Lyon. “He has this insane compulsion to make our balance sheets actually balance.”

“I can't wait to depart from this craft of joy,” Bea whispered in Lyon's ear.

Dice dropped his jacket and jumped to the deck of the houseboat before the lines had been secured. Bobby stood at the bow holding a coiled rope. He shrugged and leaped the short distance to the pier and began to complete the docking alone. Dice hurried toward Dalton.

“You lied to me again!” His voice cracked with intensity.

“Probably,” Dalton said with his usual skewered smile. “If it's about being the father of your children, I have already talked to your wife about that.”

“I'm in no mood for your frivolous jokes. I went to the bank today.”

“It seems to me that you often go to the bank. In fact, Randy, you are always going to the bank.”

“They asked me about the sale of your West Hartford house. A clerk picked up the deed transfer during a routine check of the week's recordings. That house was one of the items we pledged as loan collateral. I gave my word. I signed disclosure statements and notes to that effect. My word and reputation are on the line, and you sold it out from under us and never deposited the money in our corporate accounts.”

“It slipped my mind.”

“This is the end, Dalton. I warned you. I am finished. I resign from the corporation effective immediately.”

“Let us reason together, my boy,” Dalton said as he took the irate businessman's arm and led him across the deck away from the others. Dice seemed to shrink as he listened to Dalton, and after a short conversation he stepped back on the pier and began to walk slowly up the hill to his parked car. His suit jacket lay on the planking where he had discarded it.