Set Sail for Murder (18 page)

“Then something sad and classical, played on a harp, to wring as many tears as possible from the mourners,” Placenta continued. “‘Pavane for a Dead Princess.’ ‘The Meditation.’ ‘Somewhere in Time.’”

Rosemary looked at the two interlopers. “Death and dying. The subject seems to hold a great fascination for you and Polly Pepper. What’s the story? Is it prurient? Or a side effect to all the champagne that you people swill?”

The waitress returned and set the two margaritas before Saul and Rosemary. She collected Tim’s Zip ‘n Sip quicktrack liquor card and applied the price of the four drinks to Polly’s charge account. He and Placenta raised their glasses to Saul and Rosemary and said, “To the remainder of this Kool Krooz adventure! May we all arrive in Juneau without anyone accidentally or on purpose falling overboard, or having their lives otherwise sucked out of otherwise perfectly healthy bodies.”

“Hear! Hear!” Placenta agreed, and took a dainty taste of her gin. “And, for the record, we’re only interested in the deaths of people we know and or love, such as Laura Crawford, Ricardo Montalban, Suzanne Pleshette, Robert
Goulet, and Vampira. Oh, and for another record, our champagne is far from swill.”

Tim took a fortifying swallow from his glass and looked at Rosemary. “Yeah, even in Hollywood, we tend to like lively
living
things. The Geiko Gecko is a good example. Cuter than hell, eh? If I could find an adorable Aussie with an accent like that, I’d be a happily married man.”

Tim suddenly interrupted himself and snapped his fingers. “Dumbo’s mother’s song! That’s what we should play at Laura’s memorial service. I’ll get Polly to ask Renée Fleming to sing.”

Placenta brought a hand to her chest. “Personally, I can’t watch
Dumbo.
Separation anxiety. Walt Disney was a sadist. I mean, why would anyone make cartoons about innocent forest and jungle creatures and beautiful princesses becoming orphans, for crying out loud? The horrors of those stories stay with children for the rest of their lives. But that song is perfect for sending a loved one off for their eternal sleep.”

“There won’t be a dry eye in the house, even among the guests who hated her guts,” Tim said, “which, unfortunately, will be ninety-nine percent of those present.”

“Why go to someone’s memorial if you disliked them?” Rosemary sniffed.

“To be seen, of course,” Placenta said. “We’re talking Hollywood C-list celebs, but they’ll get free hors d’oeuvres.”

Tim turned to Rosemary. “What’s it like knowing that you were the last person on this ship to see a famous celebrity before she had her head cut off?”

Rosemary was surprised and miffed by the question. “How would any normal person feel?”

“I asked how did
you
feel?”

Rosemary pursed her lips. “No matter how much of a pain in the neck a person is, they don’t deserve to be driven out of this world the way Laura Crawford was. And, just so you know, I wasn’t the last person to see her alive. There’s
the guy who slit her throat. Remember him? I just found the bloody corpse.”

“How do you know it was a guy who killed Laura?” Placenta asked.

Rosemary shrugged.

“Any idea who?” Tim asked. “A customer? Polly said you mentioned a man getting a treatment in the next room.”

Rosemary smirked.
“Treatment
is the operative word. I rather think he had other priorities than murder.”

“I don’t follow,” Placenta said.

“Don’t be naïve,” Rosemary sassed. “Talia, the other masseuse, provides ‘special services’—for select customers. Rich ones. If you get my drift.”

Placenta pretended to take a long moment for the information to filter into her head. Then she feigned shock and amusement. “This really is a Kool Krooz,” she giggled. “Romance on the high seas. But not very much like the Doris Day musical.”

“Not very much like romance, either,” Rosemary sniggered. “Now, I really need to leave. I have an appointment to keep.”

“At this hour?” Placenta said, looking at her watch.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but some of my best appointments are kept at hours later than this one, honey.” As Rosemary once again attempted to leave her bench seat, it was Tim’s turn to keep her corralled. “What did you and Laura talk about when she arrived for her massage? What was her mood like?” he asked.

Rosemary was miffed that her exit was obstructed. “Her mood? Unpleasant. I’m quickly getting that way myself,” she declared while trying to force Tim to move. “She came in with attitude. To her, I was nobody and she was supposed to be someone. Once. A long time ago. When she arrived at the spa, I got the impression that she didn’t want to talk, so I kept my mouth shut until …”

Saul listened closely to what Rosemary was saying.

“… the door to the room opened unexpectedly,” Rosemary added. “Someone, a man, stood there for a moment then said, ‘Sorry. Wrong number.’”

“You saw who it was?” Tim asked.

“No. Just his form. The room was dark, except for the candlelight,” Rosemary remembered. “It was just a quick ‘hi, bye’ sort of thing. Obviously, someone made a mistake. The guy was probably embarrassed that he’d barged in on a treatment. He left in a split second. No harm done.”

“Wouldn’t you normally lock the door to prevent that sort of thing from happening?” Tim said.

Rosemary shrugged.

“Who would open a closed door in a spa?” Placenta thought aloud. “Everything that goes on there is private. Another reason to lock the doors to the treatment rooms. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident. Maybe someone wanted to make sure that they knew where Laura was.” Placenta looked at Rosemary. “You’re lucky that he didn’t walk in, lock the door behind him, and butcher the two of you at the same time.”

Rosemary reached for her drink and took a long swallow. “So why didn’t he? That is, if this guy was the killer. Why give up a perfect opportunity to do his job, then and there?”

“Waiting until you left?” Placenta said.

“He couldn’t be guaranteed that there would be another opportunity. I mean, even I didn’t know that I’d soon leave Laura unattended.”

“Perhaps he was a scout, the advance man, for the killer,” Tim suggested. “He kept an eye on the victim-to-be for his boss.”

“Nah.” Placenta dismissed the idea. “Most killers work alone. Unless …”

“Mob?” Tim said.

“I never heard that she was in any way involved,” Placenta
continued. “Generally, that kind of stuff is at least hinted at along the short Hollywood grapevine.”

“What about a contract?” Tim added. “God knows Laura had a lot of enemies. But come on, just ‘cause you hate someone’s guts doesn’t mean you have them removed from the planet.”

“Not unless your name is Simpson or Blake or Spector or Peterson or that other Peterson or …” Placenta said.

“So much for your ‘polite Hollywood society’,” Saul said.

Placenta cackled. “‘Hollywood, polite, and society’ are three words not generally used in the same sentence. There’s David Hyde Pierce genuine polite. Then there’s Victoria Principal not-actually-shooting-the-maid-that-she-allegedly-threatened-at-gunpoint-because-the-dog-didn’t-do-#2-as-quickly-as-diva lady-wanted, polite. If you work as a maid for V.P. you’d better feed her dog a lot of prunes, or you’re out of a slave labor job fast.”

An increasingly mellow Saul took a sip from his margarita and said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this….”

“Of course you should,” Placenta encouraged. “We’re all friends.”

“Okay. A few years ago we had a passenger who won a sweepstakes for a weeklong cruise. Turned out, his was the only name in the pot for the prize. It was set up. A phony contest. To get him on a ship in international waters. He was murdered. Shot at close range. Between the eyes. In his stateroom.”

“No muss. No fuss.” Rosemary continued the story. “When the killer finished his job, he locked the stateroom door from within, hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle outside, and no one found the body until debarkation day.”

“By then, the killer had left the ship,” Saul said. “I’m telling you this so you’ll know that I have some experience with contract killers.”

“Good to know,” Tim said dismissively. “I guess expert
killers have plenty of practice. They probably don’t leave much of a mess. An assignment comes, the job is completed quickly and efficiently. There’s a negligible amount of evidence. Then they disappear.”

Placenta continued. “I’m trying to imagine a hit man coming into a spa room and, while his target has his or her face down on the massage table, he puts the barrel of a gun with a silencer to the base of their skull, pulls the trigger, and pow, it’s over. So easy.”

“But the person who killed Laura must have been an amateur ‘cause he made a terrible mess,” Rosemary said.

“The fact that he improvised a weapon by sharpening a DVD instead of using a knife or a gun, tells me that he hadn’t spent a lot of time planning how to get rid of her,” Tim said. “He wasn’t prepared.”

Placenta crossed her arms and took a deep breath as she considered Tim’s conjecture. “Polly always said, ‘An amateur in the theater is as dangerous as Dick Cheney’s brain in
The Situation Room.
When they screw up they go to extremes to cover their butts.’ I think you’re absolutely right. We have an amateur killer running around this ship. I’ll bet that Polly is closer than she thinks to finding out his identity. Just like that note and the Q&A card at yesterday’s show.”

“The closer she gets, the more afraid he’ll become, and the possibility of him killing again, in order to save his own skin, rises,” Tim agreed. He turned to Saul and said, “About the obituary in the
Daily Wave
—who has access to the computer it was on?”

Saul twisted his mouth and said, “It’s the crew’s communal computer. We all use it.”

“Does everybody use the same password to log in?”

“It’s always on. No password needed. But there’s usually a long wait because everyone uses the same machine to download their e-mails.”

“Is there a sign-in roster so we’ll know who used the computer today?” Placenta asked.

“That wouldn’t help. The obit was sent via text messaging from someone who wasn’t a crew member,” Saul said.

“To whose account?”

“Our office assistant, Julie,” Saul said. “She opened it and pasted the material into the
Daily Wave
document. We’ve already checked on the address of the sender. But we don’t have the technical support to find out where it came from. The police in Juneau will have to take on that problem.”

Tim sighed. “So Captain Sheridan isn’t really mad at Polly, he’s protecting her.”

“Mad?” Saul laughed. “He wishes he was the captain of a seventeenth-century vessel so he could legally put Polly Pepper out on a raft and send her away. He’s furious! He’s had more than his share of suspicious deaths on his watch over the past couple of years. If one more dead person takes this cruise, he’ll be in deep doo-doo at the main office. Captain Sheridan wants to retire with full benefits, but he’ll be replaced if anything else goes wrong.”

“So he doesn’t have a heart after all,” Tim said. “He’s doing what the amateurs do, protecting his pension.”

After drinking his second margarita, Saul became more animated. He started swaying to the music and when Lawrence started playing “Funkytown,” Saul reached across Rosemary and took Placenta’s hand. “Let’s dance!”

Before Placenta had a chance to object, Saul pulled her up from her seat and escorted her to the dance floor. As they started gyrating and bumping hips, Placenta gave Lawrence a wide-eyed look and shrugged. He smiled back and nodded approval.

Saul couldn’t quite find the beat of the music. He moved his arms around and bounded to the left and right, but he had no rhythm. “You’re a regular Derek Hough,” Placenta lied, realizing it was her job to make them look good.

Saul smiled and continued bobbing his head and flailing his arms. “After my crummy day, this is just want I needed. I’ll be lucky if I still have a job when we reach port.”

Placenta raised her arms in the air and bumped Saul’s right hip. Then she moved to his other side and bumped his left hip. “You must have a hard job trying to please over two thousand passengers, and all the so-called talent aboard this ship, not to mention the captain, and a demanding harridan like Rosemary.”

“Every day it’s like I’m getting blasted with pellets from a semiautomatic BB gun. I have to hear complaints from freaky passengers, or someone among the crew telling me I did something wrong, and then there’s Rosemary. Impatient. Argumentative. Has to have things her way. She and I are friends, but only because we have to work together. We’re different personalities. She’s hard as nails, and I’m an easygoing live-and-let live guy. Wouldn’t harm a butterfly.”

“Not so easygoing on the wrists,” Placenta said. “Friends don’t give friends bruises.”

Saul slowly came to a standstill. “She started it.”

Placenta continued to bop and shimmy to the music. “Of course she did. Keep dancing. We make a cute couple. But you realize that you’re both going to be in a ton of trouble if you don’t do something about this situation.”

“What situation?”

“I’m not dumb. I only play an idiot to throw people off.” She smiled. “Polly and Tim picked up on your scheme right away. I confess that it took me a moment longer. But now I’m sure.”

“Of?”

“You and Rosemary. You’re completely responsible for …”

Saul clenched his jaw and curled his upper lip. He started to hyperventilate as he stared deep into Placenta’s eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“C’mon. You’re not stupid,” Placenta brayed. “Oh, this is a good song for you,” she said as Lawrence began playing “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”

“I’m outta here,” Saul said, and left the dance floor.

Placenta followed on his heels as he returned to the table where Tim was sitting alone. “Our fourth Musketeer is missing,” she said.

“Was there too much garlic in my dinner?” Tim said.

“Let me smell,” Placenta said. “No. Anyway, Rosemary said she had important business to take care of. It’s just as we suspected.” She surreptitiously winked at Tim. “Saul told me everything.”