Several Deaths Later (18 page)

    Or so he thought until he began looking carefully at the jumble of personal effects on the bed.

    Something was missing. He wasn't sure what. He just had the impression that not all the stuff Captain Hackett had given him was there now.

    It took him ten minutes of sifting and ten minutes of trying to remember everything that Hackett had handed over before he realized what was gone.

    Sanderson's newspaper clippings about the fire and the Indiana beauty contest. What bearing did they have on "Celebrity Circle"? And whose identity would they have exposed? Strange. Damn strange.

    

    

    

    "Say, would you dance with me so my husband could take a picture of us?"

    The woman, bigger than Tobin-which was not, after all, an especially impressive feat-had grabbed him just inside the restaurant where he'd gone in search of Cindy.

    The woman was dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West and her husband as Teddy Roosevelt. The husband, drunk, tried aiming a Polaroid at Tobin. Everything here was, if anything, crazier than when Tobin had left. Two fat men did something like a polka with each other while their wives laughed so hard they pounded each other on the shoulder. The two fat men were up on a table. A waiter, in a snit, and probably a well-deserved snit, took a drunk's drink and poured it into a flower bowl, apparently telling the man he'd been cut off. The dance floor was darker now; only a feeble dawnlike hue of pink from a baby spotlight offered any illumination, and some of the scenes on the dance floor were reasonably pornographic, the frivolity of earlier hours having given way to pure-and understandable-lust.

    "I've danced with everybody on 'Celebrity Circle,' " the woman said. "And Henry's taken my picture with every one. You're the last."

    "Goody," Tobin said, letting her pull him onto the floor and into his arms as the trio played "The Impossible Dream" as a samba. "Smile," Henry said.

    "I always liked you better than your partner on that review show," the woman said. "He was too snotty. He didn't like Robert Redford."

    "Neither do I," Tobin said.

    The woman, fiftyish, giggled. "Yes, but you're cute."

    He supposed there was logic there somewhere.

    As they danced, and Henry continued to punch out the Polaroids, Tobin glanced round the dance floor for sight of Cindy. But nothing. He saw all the others on the "Celebrity Circle" dais-and they all glowered at him whenever he made eye contact-except Cindy and Kevin Anderson.

    My God, what if…

    "It's such a great show," the Wicked Witch said. "Beg pardon?"

    "The show. 'Celebrity Circle.' It's great."

    "Oh. Thanks. But I'm only doing this cruise and then I'm gone."

    "Everybody looks like they're having so much fun." She giggled her annoying giggle again. The song was interminable. "I'd pay to be on that panel. I really would."

    "Yes," Tobin said, on autopilot now, and only half-listening to her.

    He was fearing the worst. That Kevin had sweet-talked Cindy…

    The song, at last, ended and the woman said, rather threateningly really, "Did you get some good ones, Henry?"

    "I got some wonderful ones, honey." He said "shome" and he said "wunnerful" and saying so nearly fell over, from the booze, backwards.

    "Thanks," Tobin said, extricating himself from her grasp. "I really enjoyed it."

    And then he was off to the dais, pressing himself through dancers and sweet-talkers and boosters and sots, and at last he reached the dais and felt the laserlike collective glare of the "Celebrity Circle" group searing through him.

    "Looks like Cindy dumped you again, Tobin," Jere Farris said.

    "She wanted somebody who could get it up in less than a half-hour," said America's favorite school teacher, Cassie McDowell.

    Only Susan Richards had the grace to look embarrassed at Cassie's drunken ugliness.

    He turned back to the end of the table where Joanna Howard sat talking to a busboy who was obviously about her speed-neither one appeared to know how to put the moves on anybody.

    He went up to her. "Have you seen Cindy?"

    She glanced up and then frowned. "She… left."

    Tobin cleared his throat. "Kevin?"

    She paused. She tried to spare his feelings. "I really didn't see."

    Which of course meant Yes.

    The bastard had come back here after the confrontation in Tobin's cabin and taken Cindy away. But why, after the way he'd treated her last night, would she go?

    Then he smiled to himself.

    She'd go because women like Cindy seemed to derive perverse pleasure from men who treated them badly. Tobin had never understood this, and didn't care to, really.

    When his gaze fell on Joanna again, he saw that she was watching her lover, Jere Farris, in the arms of his wife on the dance floor.

    Tobin said, "You can do better than him, Joanna. You really can."

    She smiled with her soft forlorn eyes and said, "Weren't you the one asking about Cindy a few seconds ago?"

    "Good point," he said, and went back to his cabin.

    

    

    

    Tobin, back in his cabin, calculated the time and decided to hell with it. He had to find out why somebody took the newspaper clippings relating to Everett Sanderson's presence on the cruise ship and left everything else.

    He took one of Sanderson's brochures, looked at the phone number and town name and zip code rubber-stamped on the back of it, and then picked up the phone.

    He first tried the number of the agency itself and got a ghostly answering machine, one of those recordings that sound as if they'd been made by a poltergeist. It said the agency was closed and would be open at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, if tomorrow was a weekday. Then, fortunately, it left another number to call in case of emergency.

    Tobin certainly considered this an emergency. On the fourteenth ring a woman with a cigarette cough answered the phone. Tobin said, "Hello?"

    The woman kept coughing and finally said, "Who the hell is this anyway?"

    The detective agency wasn't nearly as friendly as it had promised to be in the brochure.

    

    

    

    It was while she was slathering her rather nice twenty-eight-year-old body with a bar of very soapy soap that Cindy thought she heard some kind of bump or thump in the cabin outside of Kevin Anderson's bathroom.

    She stood very still, aware suddenly of just how naked naked really was, and held her breath the way she had when she'd been a little girl and played boogeyman with her brother and her brother was three steps away from finding her hiding under the bed-held her breath and strained her hearing so hard she got a slight headache.

    But there was just the warm water beating on her body, beading on her body, and the pleasant exhaustion that came at the end of a long day.

    Then she decided she was being paranoid. Maybe Kevin had just opened and shut a drawer with undue power. He liked doing stuff like that-flinging back doors and jerking up chairs from the floor and twisting them around to sit on. It was because he did things like that, or so she supposed, that she'd finally accepted his apologies for last night ("I've just been sort of uptight, babe," was the way he'd said it, not ever using the exact word sorry exactly but she knew that for a guy like him-he had, after all, had his own network series and there was the promise of another-that for a guy like him even those words had been difficult to say) and so, at the last, Tobin gone, she'd said, yes, all right, she'd go back to his cabin with him, both of them knowing of course what that meant.

    Kevin had wanted to take her two steps inside the cabin door. The nun's outfit had really fired up most of the men. But inside its heavy black folds she'd run with sweat and insisted on taking a quick shower, during which time she'd started composing a letter to Aberdeen about how weird this trip was becoming, with a TV star practically begging her for her company.

    A door slammed.

    She couldn't be sure of it.

    It might have been any number of other things- somebody drunk falling against the wall in the corridor, Kevin sliding back the closet door with his usual enthusiasm-but somehow she thought not.

    Somehow she thought a door had slammed.

    Tired of all her apprehension, she turned off the shower, slid back the door, and grabbed a big white fluffy towel.

    She dried off quickly, took a smaller towel to use as a turban for her hair, and then left the slippery tiles and steamy air of the bathroom.

    She found Kevin immediately and began screaming almost as immediately.

    

    

    

    "That little squirt on TV?" the woman said.

    "That's me."

    "What the hell you doin' callin' here at three in the morning?" Her voice had gotten much friendlier since he'd explained who he was. Fortunately, or so she confided, she'd always preferred him to Richard Dunphy.

    "You know that a man named Everett Sanderson was murdered."

    A mournful pause. Sigh. "Yep."

    "He was your husband?"

    "Nope. Brother-in-law. His wife died twenty years ago or so and he never remarried. Ever since he lived upstairs in our youngster's room. Him and Merle, that's my husband, they ran the agency together."

    "That's what I'm calling about."

    "The agency?"

    "About what Everett was doing on the cruise." Another pause. "You'd be wantin' to talk to Merle about that."

    "Could you hand the phone over to him?"

    "Can't."

    "Asleep?"

    "Gone."

    "Where?"

    Pause. "I really shouldn't be talkin' to you. Merle hates it when I talk to people about his business."

    "When will he be back, Mrs. Sanderson?"

    "Tomorrow morning sometime." Beat. "He's doin' a divorce case. One of those stakeout jobs. He'll be real tired. He'll want a big breakfast-three eggs and some sausages and some wheatcakes and some toast with peanut butter and jelly-then he'll want to roll right into bed."

    "What would be a good time to call him?"

    "Maybe two, three in the afternoon. Our time."

    "All right." Then he thought of the newspaper clipping. "By the way, did your husband or Everett ever mention a man who died in a trailer fire named William Kelly?"

    "How'd you find out about him?" She sounded suspicious.

    "They have mentioned him then?"

    "Of course they mentioned him. He was kin. A first cousin."

    "What?"

    "Sure. Hell, I was to his baptism. He was a good boy and then-"

    "Then what?"

    "Now I'm gettin' into agency business and that's where Merle can get mighty mad. You just call back like I told you to."

    "But-"

    "You just call back." And then she hung up.

    

    

    He had just decided to light up a cigarillo when a heavy hand fell many times on his cabin door.

    He was up off the bed, frightened and puzzled, in seconds.

    Captain Hackett stood in the door. You could tell he'd been drunk and had then gotten sober abruptly.

    He looked old and he looked miserable. "It's happened again."

    "What's happened?"

    "A killing."

    "Who?"

    "Kevin Anderson."

    "My God."

    "Come on," the captain said, "and hurry.”

    

    

    

    They had put him out in the corridor and they had put a white sheet over him and into the white sheet had soaked the red blood, his blood of course, that had come from the repeated shots in the chest.

    He was tall enough that the sheet only reached to just below his knees. You got a good look at very hairy legs and soles with athlete's foot.

    The costume party, which had still been going on even though the more sensible or more lustful had long since fled it, had brought out moth-to-flame onlookers. They stood now in their silly getups-Snow White and Teddy Roosevelt and Superman-watching as somber men in white jackets went in and out of the room. Occasionally Captain Hackett came out and asked them to please, please go back to the party and have a good time, that there had been another misfortune (he was a word man, was the captain) but there was nothing for them to fear. A few complained, a few more threatened, but they were too drunk and filled with the festivities to do anything but wobble back from where they'd come, along the deck of the cruise ship, the stars brilliant and timeless, the moon full and pagan. The band had never stopped playing and the air was filled with the playful, erotic strains of Cole Porter's "Love For Sale."

    

    

    "You were taking a shower?"

    "Tobin, please, don't I get a lawyer or something?"

    Tobin went over and hunched down next to her. They were in Kevin Anderson's cabin. You could smell blood and other terrible things. You could see where, in falling over backwards from the force of the shots, Kevin Anderson had smashed a lamp and cracked a mirror. There was a sinister aspect to the room now. The lights seemed very bright. The carpet was splotchy red. Now Tobin sensed what detectives must feel when they come on a murder scene. There was something pornographic about it all.