Several Deaths Later (20 page)

    Tobin glanced at him, then pushed inside.

    The curtains were still drawn. The room stank of bourbon. The bed was a mess. There was the scent of sleep and sweat and vomit. With the door closed, Tobin felt as if he had stepped down into a deep hole that had sealed itself behind him.

    She sat curled in a chair. She was naked. There was for the moment nothing erotic about her. Indeed her nakedness was terrifying because it was obviously symbolic of her mental state.

    She turned her beautiful aging face to look up at Tobin. She said, "You know the funny thing?"

    "No," he said, "no, I don't know the funny thing."

    "Prison isn't what scares me."

    "What scares you, Susan?"

    "The photographers."

    "Why do they scare you?"

    He wished it were light in here. He wished it did not smell so womb-warm. He wished her eyes did not look so unfocused.

    "The way they used to follow Marilyn Monroe around. You remember?"

    "Yes."

    "They'd get right up to her and she'd start to cry and you could see the panic in her eyes. That's what scares me."

    "You killed them, then?"

    "Yes."

    "Why?"

    She laughed. "Tobin, it was the only career I had. Once it came out that I'd had to pay to be on it-"

    "God," he said, and sank down onto the ottoman. He leaned back a bit toward the bureau where he could smell the sweet perfume and even sweeter sachet. He liked the female smells and for the first time he became aware of the sexuality of her naked body. He felt ashamed that lust had as always triumphed over compassion.

    "What was the gunshot? You trying to kill yourself?"

    She laughed and for a moment sounded genuinely delighted. "What, and ruin my makeup? No, I was just trying to get attention, Tobin." She pointed with an elegant hand to a hole in the wall. "I just fired the gun because I thought it would sound good. I had to do something." Then her face grew sad again, like a small girl hearing terrible news, and she said, "You didn't want me to be the killer, did you?"

    "No."

    "That's very nice of you."

    He raised his head again and stared at her. "When the captain comes, don't say anything."

    "What?"

    "Don't say anything until you've got a lawyer."

    "It doesn't matter, Tobin. It really doesn't."

    "It matters to me."

    "I appreciate that."

    Tobin said, "Why kill Sanderson too? Iris Graves had discovered what was going on-Ken Norris demanding a part of your salary-but why Sanderson?"

    "Because he was helping the reporter and even if he hadn't wanted to, he would have exposed me."

    "They worked together?"

    "Yes."

    He was about to ask her more but the door creaked open and Captain Hackett put his head inside.

    "I just had a conversation with Todd Ames, Miss Richards," Captain Hackett said. "He told me what you tried to do and what you confessed to. Are those things true?"

    "Remember what I said about a lawyer," Tobin said. "Yes, Captain," Susan Richards said. "They are true."

    "God," Tobin said. "God."

    She'd been right, Susan had. He would not have been unhappy to learn that the killer was Jere Farris or Todd Ames or Cassie McDowell or even Alicia Farris. But he genuinely liked Susan Richards. Genuinely.

    Captain Hackett said, "I'll be outside, Tobin. You help her get dressed and then bring her out. All right?"

    Tobin did the only thing he could do. He nodded.

    

    

    

    "Forget the part where you think she's crazy."

    "Forget it? Why?"

    "Because if she's crazy, then people feel sorry for her and if they feel sorry for her, then it's just another story about some pathetic has-been TV star. But if she willfully and coldly set out to do in all these people-ape shit is the word I'm looking for here, Tobin."

    "That's two words."

    "Whatever. Ape shit is what our readers will do. AGING PRIME TIME QUEEN KILLS TO KEEP HER SHAME SECRET. It needs some work but it's a good peg. You earned your dough, pally."

    "Thanks."

    "Hey, you get seven grand and you sound miserable."

    "I am miserable. I happened to like Susan. And what's this seven grand stuff?"

    "Expenses."

    "What expenses?"

    "I told you already. Phone calls and stuff."

    "What's 'stuff?'"

    "Jesus, all right. We should be celebrating and we're haggling. Seventy-five hundred then."

    "First you said ten, then you said eight, and now you're saying seventy-five hundred."

    "Just get some good pictures, OK?"

    The editor of
Snoop,
who probably not only watched "Celebrity Handyman" but liked it, hung up.

    Tobin went into one of the ship's eight bars.

    

    

    

    There was a kind of ritual involved in getting drunk to forget. First of all, you wanted to reach the first level of drunkenness very quickly so you drank drinks with gin in them. In this case, Tobin used martinis. Then you wanted to sit by yourself with a window to stare through, which was easy enough to do on a cruise ship. Then you wanted to be left entirely alone with only a jukebox for company. This tiny dark bar, festooned with nautical symbols, had a jukebox that ran to Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. You couldn't ask for more than that.

    It didn't always work as you intended it to, of course. There was a certain kind of drunkenness that was just bloody wonderful, when you reached the exact point where sadness and despair meshed-there was an almost overwhelming and perverse sweetness to it.

    Unfortunately, Tobin must have gone right past it without noticing it because, almost as if he'd been in a car accident, he looked up and saw a gigantic bartender in white shirt and white ducks and white apron leaning in and hauling him out of the booth.

    "You've had enough for this afternoon, Mr. Tobin," the bartender said.

    Enough? How long had he been drinking. Enough?

    He couldn't possibly have had more than fourteen or fifteen martinis. So what if he did kind of trip and fall on his last journey to the jukebox ("Strangers in the Night" just kept sounding better and better). He tripped; was that a capital offense or what? "Come on now, Mr. Tobin. Come on now."

    

    

    

    You wake up and you can't remember anything. Nothing at all. You need to pee and you're afraid you need to barf and then you're afraid because you can't remember anything.

    He reconstructed, or tried to: Susan Richards had attempted suicide but had failed and had then confessed to Todd Ames that she'd killed the four people. Then Tobin, sad because it was Susan, had gone to get drunk. "Scoobey-doobey-doo" kept playing in his head. That and Kent cigarettes. He definitely (well, sort of definitely) recalled buying a package of Kent cigarettes and smoking them. One by one till they were all gone.

    He lay there then and pressed the remote control on his nightstand. He might as well be viewing while he was preparing himself for the enormous task of emptying his bladder and taking a shower.

    No easy thing to move your leg and put your foot on the floor and then get up and go into the bathroom.

    And then for no reason he thought of his daughter (the way fragments of memory assault you during a hangover) and how her hair had looked so red in the sunlight at her cap-and-gown graduation and how he'd hugged her and…

    The movie was
Death Wish 9
in which Charles Bronson, now an octogenarian, is dedicated to keeping safe the lives of his fellow prisoners in an old folks' home.

    They'd managed to get sex into the film by having the extremely sexy day nurse wear a see-through uniform.

    Finally, he couldn't take it any longer-not the movie, his bladder.

    He forced his leg off the bed and then his other leg and then he went and had himself a shower.

    

    

    When he came out he opened a beer left over from last night's frolic and was just having his first sip when the phone rang.

    It was an operator and she wanted to know if he was the Mr. Tobin who had called the residence of a Mr. Sanderson and Tobin said he was and then she said go ahead please.

    "Mr. Tobin, this is Everett Sanderson's brother. You were supposed to call me this afternoon." He sounded angry.

    "Damn, I completely forgot. I'm sorry."

    "You called last night and was asking the missus some questions about my cousin who died in that trailer fire."

    "Yes, I was, Mr. Sanderson."

    "I'd like to know why."

    "I wanted to know why your brother was on the cruise ship."

    "Did they find out who killed him yet?"

    "Yes."

    There was a long pause. Then a noise that might have been a sob. "There ain't nothin' bad enough that can happen to that man."

    "It's a she."

    "A woman?"

    "Yes."

    "Bullshit. No woman could kill Everett."

    Given the circumstances, Tobin decided to overlook the ridiculous remark.

    "What the hell did she have to do with Everett?"

    "He knew about Ken Norris skimming the money from the 'Celebrity Circle' cast. She didn't want that known."

    "I don't know what you're talkin' about."

    "Your brother was working with a woman named Iris Graves from a newsstand paper called
Snoop."

    
"Snoop.
Everett read it all the time but he sure as hell didn't work for it."

    "You're sure?"

    "My brother went on that boat to talk to Mandy Nichols."

    "Who?"

    "Mandy Nichols. She was married to a cousin of ours." Then he mentioned the name of the man in the newspaper clipping-the one who'd been burned to death in the trailer fire.

    Tobin leaned back against the headboard. "Why would he be trailing Mandy Nichols here?"

    "Because she killed our cousin-and damn near killed their little girl right along with him."

    Tobin explained about the newspaper clipping he'd discovered along with Everett's personal effects. "Why didn't it mention a little girl?"

    "They didn't find her till next day. She'd crawled away from the fire, then collapsed out in the woods. They'd assumed at first that Mandy had taken her along." He cursed. '"Course Mandy with her fancy notions didn't plan to take nobody along. My cousin was the kind of man who woulda tracked her down and she knew it. So she tried to kill both of 'em-her husband and her daughter."

    "And Everett's been tracking her all these years?"

    "Yes. Till about a year ago when we found her."

    "Mandy?"

    "Right."

    "Where was she?"

    "Hollywood. That was always her thing. To live in Hollywood. Couldn't sing, couldn't dance, couldn't really even act much based on what I saw in her high school plays. But she did have a good face and a good body. I gotta give her that."

    "So Everett confronted her?"

    "He tried. She had him arrested several times. He tried to tell the police what had happened-how she'd hooked up with these so-called actors who were down here on location and the three of them helped her douse the trailer with gasoline and then set it up."

    "You're sure it was the actors?"

    "Positive. It had rained three or four hours after the fire and the sheriff found four sets of tracks in the morning-three male ones and then Mandy's."

    "So Everett tracked Mandy down after all these years."

    "He sure did. We run this small investigation agency but every chance he'd get to work on the case, he'd take it. He'd keep going to the sheriff but he said we needed more evidence-then they started saying the case was so old they couldn't do anything about it even if they'd wanted to."

    "So why did he board this cruise?"

    "Because something new had come up."

    "What was that, Mr. Sanderson?"

    There was a pause, and then Sanderson told him. And then Tobin had to move very, very quickly.

    

    

    

    "I need to see Susan Richards," Tobin said, pushing through Captain Hackett's door without knocking.

    The captain, dining alone at his desk, looked up abruptly and said, "What the hell's wrong with you?"

    "I said I need to see Susan Richards."

    "Why?"

    "I want you to call the steward who's standing guard and tell him I'm going to be there in fifteen minutes and that I'm being permitted to go in and talk to her. But first I need a key to her cabin."

    "I put her in the cabin two doors down from where she was staying-for safekeeping. Care to tell me what the hell's going on?"

    Tobin said, "I don't think she's our killer."

    The captain put down his fork. "Do you know what the hell you're talking about?"

    Tobin shook his head. "I'm afraid I do, Captain. I'm afraid I do."