Several Deaths Later (2 page)

    To be perfectly honest, all he cared about was their breasts anyway.

    The girls couldn't act (two of them could barely form words), they couldn't move, but by God could they jiggle. They could jiggle wonderfully, marvelously, magnificently, and so what if it was a tatty little picture made by sleazy and cynical morons? By God, it couldn't be all bad, not with breasts like these.

    And it was then he realized (a) just how drunk he was and (b) what a great review he could write of this if only his sober courage matched his drunken inspiration.

    What if he did a review of
Thundergirls
that said right up front that it was a terrible, incompetent, dull picture but that it was filled with gorgeous breasts? Then he'd proceed to rate the three girls on exactly the basis they should be rated-their looks.

    Laughing out loud, already hearing "Sexist!" cried by a chorus of female editors and readers alike, he leaned over, actually sort of collapsed to the right, looking for more wine, and discovered that he had no more wine.

    No more wine!

    He could no more view videos without wine than he could without a Fast Forward button on his remote control.

    He would have to wobble aft and get himself another bottle.

    Then he stood up and felt the room spin. Good Lord. He needed air, fresh air, and badly and now. He left his room immediately.

    What he ended up doing, first thing, was strolling about thirty feet down the deck and barfing over the side.

    He was careful to lean out as far as he could-there were after all four other decks below him-and in the wind the stuff was rather like orange confetti against the silver moonlight, not unpretty at all.

    Then, feeling not only better but infinitely more sober, he began thinking that, after a few blasts of the mouth spray he always carried with him, he might stop in the lounge, have a diet 7-Up, and try his luck. Lay off the wine a bit. And definitely lay off the videos for the night.

    A definite spring came into his step; it was, after all, May, wasn't it? And he was aboard a vast and expensive cruise ship in the Pacific, wasn't he? And however much a shit he'd been in the past (whenever he got drunk, he inevitably began thinking of all the ways he'd let down his children, his ex-wife, various girlfriends, his parents, and at least six or seven million other people on the planet)-however much of a shit he'd been in the past, there was no reason to punish himself any more tonight, was there?

    No, not any more tonight.

    A definite spring came into his step. A definite one.

    

    

    

    Cindy didn't realize he'd been stabbed until she got him completely rolled over and then got up and turned on the lights and saw the knife sticking out of his chest and the squishy circle of red blood widening with each passing moment.

    What struck her first was the ridiculousness of it all. She knew, at least according to all the movies she'd seen, that she was (a) supposed to scream, (b) run terrified from the cabin, or (c) faint.

    But actually what she was thinking of was what a wonderful letter this would make to Aberdeen.

    

    

    
Dear Aberdeen,

    
By now you've probably heard about the murder of that handsome TV star Ken Norris.

    
Can you keep a secret? He died in my cabin during the cruise. In fact, I was in the shower just before we were supposed to-

    
Well, I suppose you can fill in that particular blank for yourself, can't you, Aberdeen?

    
I can't tell you the terrible sadness I feel. Ken and I had become extremely close during the evening we'd spent together. He'd shown me the photos in his wallet (of his 1958 red Thun-derbird and his house in Malibu) and I'd told him all about the insurance company and how
you and I suspected our supervisor, Mr. Flan-nagan, of being an embezzler and everything.

    
But please, Aberdeen, respect my feelings. Please keep this our secret.

    
Yours sincerely,

    
Cindy

    

    

    Aberdeen would be on the company's PA system for sure with this one, and what fame it would be for Cindy. How she'd sparkle among the drab people. A Pacific cruise turning into the murder of a TV star right in her own cabin. It was like Nancy Drew with sex added.

    Then she heard the noise behind her, just outside the bathroom, and realized that someone was in the closet next to the bed.

    This time she did scream.

    This time she did start to feel faint.

    She had just reached the cabin door and the corridor when she heard the closet open. Curiosity forced her to turn around for at least a glimpse of the person emerging from behind the racks of Cindy's clothes.

    Cindy gasped.

    You couldn't tell if it was a man or woman. A black snap-brim fedora and heavy black topcoat with a collar that touched the edge of the hat rushed from the closet into the moonlight and then pushed past Cindy.

    "You killed him!" Cindy shrieked. "You killed him!"

    But the figure kept moving, not running exactly, just moving steadily away from the closet and out of the cabin.

    Cindy knew better than to grab for the person. She did not want to end up the way Ken "High Rise" Norris had. For one thing, she'd be dead. For another, she wouldn't be able to write Aberdeen a letter about any of this.

    

    

    

    A spring in his step, a tune vaguely inspired by "Rhapsody in Blue" on his lips, Tobin strolled a deserted section of deck thinking of a Dennis O'Keefe movie he'd seen sometime in the early fifties. What made the picture memorable was the starlet in it-so beautiful in memory he dreamed of her still, just as he had when he was seven or eight. She seemed all things impossibly female, and occasionally-as now-he felt real loss thinking of her. What had brought her back was that the picture was set in the South Seas-or at least as much like the South Seas as the Republic Studios back lot could resemble. And being on the cruise (and being potzed) had brought back the O'Keefe picture. Maybe he'd meet somebody like the starlet aboard this ship…

    The caw of ocean birds; the scent of saltwater; and the wan moon on the wan wash of sea against the rolling boat-how he loved the water and all its myths.

    He wanted to call his children and tell them that he was idiotically happy because he was-yes, abruptly and unbelievably, he was indeed happy. The ocean was great therapy for him as it had been for no less than Eugene O'Neill and Stephen Crane and Jack London and Hart Crane-well, check Hart, the man having pitched himself miserably overboard at the end. Wonderful therapy. He wondered how much a ship-to-shore call would be, and what time it was in Boston and Los Angeles, respectively.

    And it was exactly then that he ran into somebody who was backing out of a cabin.

    He assumed she was going for little more than a brief stroll because she wore only a white terry-cloth robe and a towel wrapped around her head.

    Beneath the line of her robe he could see that she had sensational legs and as she turned he saw that she had a face to match.

    Encouraged by her mere presence-and the elegantly wrought lines of her legs-he started to introduce himself but then he saw that the woman held her hands away from her body, as if they did not belong to her. Or as if she did not want them.

    Then he realized that there was a very good reason for this. Her hands and forearms were covered in what appeared to be blood.

    "My Lord," he said.

    "He's dead. I didn't kill him. Do you think they'll believe me?"

    He was so intrigued with her face-very, very nice; an erotic naivete; or would it be a naive eroticism-that he said, "Of course they will."

    "I don't even own a knife like that."

    "Of course you don't."

    "And I had no reason in the world to kill him."

    "Of course you didn't."

    "I just wanted to take a little shower so that our time together would be-well, perfect-and then I came out and found him there. Does that sound believable?"

    He was doing his best to peer down the slight opening in her terry-cloth gown, wondrously wound up and ashamed of himself at the same time.

    While he was looking at her, she was looking at him and then she said, "You're Tobin, the critic! You're one of them!"

    "One of them?"

    "One of the panel. 'Celebrity Circle.' "

    "Ah. Yes."

    "So's he. So was he, I mean."

    Then, lust and alcohol receding, Tobin began to have some sense of what was going on here. "In your cabin," he said.

    "Yes."

    "There's a dead man."

    "Yes."

    "Stabbed, I believe you said. Or implied."

    "Yes."

    "And he's-or was, as you said-on the panel."

    "Yes."

    "My God."

    "Exactly," she said, holding her bloody hands out to him as if she wanted him to take them. "And it's not as if he's just another passenger. He's a celebrity. Or was."

    The way she said "celebrity"-so dreamily-told him far more than he should have known about her. This glimpse into her both excited and depressed him.

    Then, inevitably, he asked, "Who is he?"

    "I didn't tell you?"

    "No."

    "Ken."

    "Ken Norris?"

    "Yes. 'High Rise.'"

    Terrible show, thought Tobin, realizing the curse of being a critic. The poor bastard had just been stabbed and here Tobin was reviewing his show.

    "Do you think they'll believe me?" she said again.

    "I think so."

    "You sounded so much surer before."

    "Why don't we go have a look and then I'll call for the captain?"

    "God," she said, "Aberdeen will never believe this." He decided, for the moment, not to ask who Aberdeen might be.

    

    

    

    Following the murder of his partner, Richard Dunphy-they'd done a TV movie review show together-Tobin had found himself essentially unemployed. The company that owned the show had been sold and the new owner didn't like TV movie review shows at all. "That's sissy stuff," he'd said on the day he'd announced "World Wrestling Wrap-up" as Tobin's replacement-and so Tobin was dispatched to that limbo of late payments, bounced checks, and toadying-to-lessers called "free-lance." There were pieces, and good pieces, if he did say so, for
American Film
and
Cinema
and
Esquire;
there were less good pieces, but far more lucrative, for
Parade
("Sally Fields' Seven Rules for Being a Good Mother"), and then there was the celebrity circuit.

    While Tobin and Dunphy had hardly been famous, at least not exactly, their movie show had played on more than three hundred stations around the country, making it successful, so successful that Tobin's agent was certain that "any day now, babe, we'll be connecting with some moneymen who'll want to not only give you your own show but actually spend some bucks. Truly." Tobin's agent was named Phil Annis, a name that led to all sorts of jokes, in his case deserved. "In the meantime, though," Phil had said, which was how he always preceded news he knew Tobin would hate. "In the meantime, though, I've made a deal with Cartwright Productions for you to appear on all their basic cable shows. Not much bread, but really good exposure." Cartwright, which Tobin had only dimly heard of, turned out to own five shows: "Celebrity Gardener" (Tobin pretended to be planting roses), "Celebrity Handyman" (Tobin pretended to be building a fancy bookcase, nearly taking off a finger with a SKIL saw), "Celebrity Fitness" (Tobin was seen walking past St. Patrick's Cathedral as the camera grabbed a tight shot of his $250 walking shoes), and "Celebrity Confessions" (a show for which Tobin contrived a tale of being kidnapped at age eight and then left to wander in dark and deep woods for two days before Mommy and Daddy in the family Buick found him alive).

    All this nonsense went on for six months before Phil stumbled onto "Celebrity Circle," which was known in some uncharitable quarters as "Celebrity Circle Jerk" and which, if not exactly Hallmark Hall of Fame, was actually a successful show, one of the most successful of all syndicated game shows.

    But "Circle" was having a problem-it seemed to have peaked. Ratings while still very high were not reflecting "all that demographic and psychographic shit they worry about so much" (in the words of Phil Annis) and as a result the show went in search of a gimmick, which turned out to be a "very special two weeks of 'Celebrity Circle,'" a cruise aboard the
St. Michael,
"the world's most glamorous ship filled with the world's most glamorous stars-your very favorites from your very favorite shows including a brand-new addition- everybody's very favorite movie critic!" (all this from the publicity handout) and then two paragraphs about Tobin and all the wonderful things he'd done with his life.

    The pay wasn't a great deal over scale but for once

    Phil was right about it being "important exposure" and for another thing the cruise was in fact a great one, loaded with women, food, sun, and a certain deference paid him because he was after all that most enviable of American entities, a celebrity.

    All he had to do was show up to tape nine segments in the jerry-rigged studio on the main deck and the rest of the time he was free to do whatever he could get away with-if he could spare the time from viewing.