Several Deaths Later (13 page)

    I overheard Kevin tell Cassie in the bar that he'd gotten something yesterday, too-then this second letter. Really strange.

    

    

    "What you writin', babe?"

    "Oh, good morning, Kevin."

    "Good morning. So what're you writing?"

    "Just kind of like a note."

    "A note."

    "Well, more like a letter."

    "A letter?"

    "Yes."

    "To who?"

    "Aberdeen."

    "Who's that?"

    "This sort of heavy-set woman who has a mustache I work with at the insurance company."

    He was bored instantly. "Oh."

    "I was telling her about last night."

    They were naked. It was the middle of the afternoon and they were still naked from the night before and needing showers and…

    He reached over and kissed her right breast (the one whose nipple was about a quarter-inch longer than the other one, which really bugged her when she thought about it, and she thought about it more than you'd think) and said, "So you told her about us."

    "Well."

    "It's OK, babe."

    "It is?"

    "Sure."

    He grinned. "First 'cause I'm good and I know I am and second because, well, it's just human nature to spread the news when you sleep with a celebrity."

    "It is?"

    He was propped up on one elbow now and deftly stroking her shoulder. With his hair mussed, and slightly in need of a shave, and enough chest hair to make a grizzly envious, he really looked hunky. Really.

    "Sure. First month I was in Hollywood, I slept with the late Constance LaRue."

    "Are you serious?"

    "Right. I had just come out from a farm in South Dakota and I was parking cars at what's now the Harlequin Dinner Theater and she spotted me."

    "You mean spotted you for a movie or something?"

    He grinned again. "Or something. Connie-Constance-she liked very young, very industrious men."

    "But she played a nun in that musical with…" She shook her head. Boy, wait till she told Aberdeen about what Constance LaRue was really like.

    "Have you ever been on Johnny Carson?" she asked.

    "Couple of times."

    "He as nice as he seems?"

    "He's an asshole. He should've quit ten years ago. On top. That's the only way to go out." He paused. "That's how I left my series. On top."

    Without thinking, Cindy said, "But wasn't your series cane-"

    And then, seeing the glare in his eyes, she said, "Oh, that's right. You quit because you wanted to do movies."

    "Right."

    "I saw that one too.
The Fungoids.
It was really great."

    "Writing wasn't all it could've been but it was a good vehicle for me. It went through the roof in South America so I went down there a few years and made a bundle. That's how I bought all those doughnut franchises I was tellin' you about last night."

    "Oh, right." Actually, Cindy had tried to forget about the doughnut franchises because somehow they spoiled the effect.

    Actors should act and when they weren't acting they should stand at picture windows and swish brandy around in snifters and let the crest on their smoking jackets kind of gleam in the shadows.

    "I'm a morning man."

    "Huh?" Cindy said. Her eyes had strayed to her

    purse, where she'd stuck the envelope that had been pushed under his door. Ever since waking up, she'd been thinking of how she was going to tell him about the envelope.

    Because it was definitely a problem.

    How could she show him the envelope without explaining to him that in effect she'd been opening his mail?

    "Couldn't we take a shower first?"

    "Great idea. Together."

    "No, I didn't mean…"

    But he was kissing her, and even with morning mouth (his and hers alike) she forgot all about the envelope.

    Twenty minutes later, she had at least six new things to tell Aberdeen about Kevin Anderson.

    Seven if you counted what he showed her to do with the soap.

    

    

    

    By now of course Tobin was beginning to assume the worst. Not only had Cindy McBain gone off with Kevin Anderson but she had most definitely slept with him. All morning Tobin had been able to tell himself that maybe Anderson had gotten to first or maybe second or maybe even, after plying her with drinks, third base, but no home run stuff, no out-of-the-park routines. But, as Tobin knocked on her empty room several times, and then checked various lounges and eateries, and then walked the length of several decks never so much as glimpsing her-gradually he began to understand the real implication of what was going on here. And, ridiculous as it was, he felt betrayed and jealous. She hadn't made love to Tobin because she'd been so upset with Ken Norris's death. But the blond macho TV cop was apparently another matter.

    Quite another matter, Tobin thought as he made his way along the middle deck into the sunlight and in the direction of the captain's cabin. He assumed that by now Dr. Devane had sobered up and that both he and the Captain had had time to go through the dead people's effects. Perhaps they'd learned something useful about Iris Graves and the man killed with her.

    A deck tennis game was in progress as Tobin reached the unfettered sunlight. He was dressed in a white shirt and white ducks and white deck shoes without socks. His red hair was brilliant in the yellow light. He smiled as passengers waved in recognition, or pointed or whispered. He owed them courtesy. God knew they'd put up with him and his pontifications on the tube (he could still recall saying, in a spontaneous if obscure burst, that John Ford was "a racist but not a malicious one," and while
he
knew what he'd meant, nobody else had, as evidenced by the hundreds of letters comparing him to various Nazi figures, and KKK leaders) and he should be in return, and at the least, polite.

    The blue water of the pool shimmered as if it were not quite real. Around the perimeter, on the tiles, lay any number of women who could fulfill the most exotic of Tobin's fantasies.

    One of them, delightfully enough, even reached out and grasped his ankle.

    "Not speaking?"

    "Oh, hi," Tobin said.

    "Did you finally get some sleep?"

    "Finally. And you?"

    She smiled. "Finally." Susan Richards was even better looking in the daylight wearing a one-piece white bathing suit, such suits invariably reminding him of Julie Adams in
The Creature From the Black Lagoon,
a seventh-grade spectacle so astonishing that he began to understand that the most exalted feeling on the planet, right next to godliness, was horniness. She wore sunglasses so black he could not even glimpse the shape of her eyes behind them. She smiled. "But my wrinkles were still there, this morning."

    "Wrinkles?"

    "Around my eyes and mouth. My agent wants me to pay a little visit to my friendly neighborhood plastic

    surgeon because I got turned down for a role two months ago. Because of my age."

    "You're beautiful, Susan, and you know it."

    She dismissed his compliment with a graceful hand. "Twenty-two lines in a Raquel Welch mini-series. I was supposed to be her younger sister. But the casting director said I was too old." She laughed but there was a chilly sadness in her voice. "Oh, he didn't say it quite that way, of course. I think he said, 'Raquel and you are too much alike. It might confuse the audience.' " She paused then. "We had a meeting."

    "Who had a meeting?"

    "The regulars on 'Celebrity Circle.'"

    "Oh?"

    "Yes, and Todd said that you think one of us is the killer. Is that right?"

    He shrugged. "I don't know who else it could be."

    Her beautiful mouth became ironic. "Does that include me?"

    "Well…"

    "You're cute when you're trying to be evasive." She put out a hand to be helped up. He thought of holding this same hand last night. The darkness seemed impossible now that yellow day burned the deck.

    As she stood up, she grabbed a black leather Gucci casual bag and a tiny framed black-and-white photograph of a little girl. He was about to ask her about the girl when Jere Farris strolled by and said, "Coming to the costume party tonight?" and then went on without waiting for an answer.

    "Well," Susan Richards said, "are you?"

    "I suppose."

    "You sound delighted."

    "It's the idea of dressing up in funny clothes, I guess.

    I've never been able to figure out why adults like to do that."

    She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, and he thought of last night again, now so idyllic in memory, and she laughed like wind chimes and said, "Who said we're adults, Tobin?"

    

    

    

    "Sanderson was a private detective."

    "From an agency?"

    "Agency?"

    "Yes," Tobin said, "a detective agency. Like Pinker-ton's."

    The captain shook his head. "Not from the looks of this brochure. I'd say he was strictly free-lance and not exactly running an empire, either."

    He handed Tobin a two-color trifold brochure. The paper was rough to the touch and you could see where the ink had smudged in the printing. The outer panel said, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS OUR SPECIALTY.

    "Pretty much what you'd expect," Captain Hackett said as Tobin opened up the flap and looked inside.

    There were several photographs of Everett Sanderson, all of them taken when he was much younger. In one photo he wore navy whites; in another, a dark police uniform; in a third (and the most recent) he appeared as he had aboard this cruise ship, a chunky, sixtyish man in a conservative western suit with a white Stetson, string tie, and bulldoglike jowls. The copy beneath these photos referred to the fact that Everett Sanderson had served first his country, then his city, and now, on a for-hire basis, he was serving the public.

    "Simpson, Kentucky," Captain Hackett said.

    They sat in his office. Sunlight streamed through their whiskey glasses, giving the liquid a golden gleam, as the ceiling fan chopped briskly at stale air. The captain explained that the Coast Guard would be sending investigators within thirty-six hours.

    "That mean anything to you?" Tobin said.

    "No. I was hoping it meant something to you."

    Tobin smiled. "Afraid not. But there is something that would mean something to me."

    "What's that?"

    "What you and the doctor checked Cindy McBain for the other morning."

    "I guess you're on our side now."

    "Is that an answer?"

    The captain sighed. "We found blood." The captain paused. "Why didn't you tell me?"

    "We weren't quite sure you could keep a secret." He frowned. "I'm sorry, Tobin."

    "Tell me about the blood."

    "There was plenty of it. He'd been stabbed."

    "A second blood type on the rug. We think that the killer must have cut him or herself while stabbing Ken Norris. So we were checking Miss McBain's hands and arms for any cut marks."

    "You didn't find any."

    "Correct." He hesitated. Cleared his throat softly. "But we did find somebody with exactly the sort of cut marks we would have expected."

    "You did?"

    "Yes. Miss Graves."

    "The dead woman?"

    "Right. And, in her belongings, we also found a notebook-a sort of journal, actually. She wrote about going into Miss McBain's room-after following Ken Norris all night. But she didn't cut herself on the knife. She cut herself on a piece of a lamp that had been knocked over and shattered. That's what she said in her journal and that squares with what we found at the scene." Now it was his turn to smile. "She was also the mysterious figure in the trenchcoat and snap-brim hat your friend McBain kept going on about."

    "Why the hell was she following Norris?"

    "Story, presumably." He leaned leftward, opened a drawer, and withdrew the small brown leather notebook Alicia Farris and Iris Graves had been struggling over the day of Iris's death. "She has a lot of rambling notes in here. I spent most of last night sipping sherry and looking through them. Care to take the notebook and see what you can come up with?"

    "Sure."

    The captain said, "They're hiding something."

    "Who?"

    "The 'Celebrity Circle' bunch. You'll see that very clearly when you start reading the notebook there. Something binds them together-but I'm not sure what."

    "You heard about Cassie McDowell slapping Todd Ames last night?"

    "Yes."

    "Whatever binds them together seems to be coming apart."

    "That's my impression too." He glanced out the porthole. "Some days I wish I would have been a Greyhound driver." He poured some brandy from his cut-glass snifter. "My daughter from Oak Park was supposed to bring her children on this cruise. Thank Christ one of my granddaughters came down with the measles." He turned back to Tobin. "I don't have any idea what Sanderson was doing on this trip but I suspect he was working with her."

    "With Iris Graves?"

    "Isn't it likely?"

    Tobin considered. Then, "She worked for
Snoop.
It's a publication that probably hires dozens of private investigators. I suppose they could have been working on a story together."