Killed in Paradise Page 10

  He didn’t wait for me to say “Well,” for which I blessed him. I hate people who make you beg for it.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said.

  “You keep saying that,” I said. My nails were making dents in the palms of my hands, but I was not shouting. “She’ll be all right from what?”

  “Shipboard chemical cocktail. People on the mainland take all kinds of pills—tranquilizers, antidepressants, diet pills, sleeping pills. They come on the ship. There’s lots of good food so they take more diet pills. Or there’s so much going on, they take sleeping pills to knock themselves out immediately when they get back at last to their cabins, instead of unwinding naturally. The body chemistry is confused from the new schedule and the time changes, and the chemicals don’t help. Top it off with some seasickness, or a seasickness remedy, and the body rebels. That’s all.”

  “Kenni hasn’t taken any pills,” I said.

  “She told me she has taken Dramamine this afternoon,” the doctor said. He frowned. “Though why she should deny taking anything else is beyond me. She must have had barbiturate at least.”

  “Maybe somebody slipped it to her.”

  Sinatra started on “Strangers in the Night.” Dr. Sato hummed along for a few bars, then smiled gently at me.

  “Mr. Cobb,” he said. “I know you have been...close to the young lady for several days, but can you really say she hasn’t been out of your sight long enough to be able to take a few sleeping pills?”

  He had a point. I hadn’t even known she’d taken anything for seasickness. I was too upset, though, to concede it. “Why would she deny it?”

  “Perhaps she is embarrassed. Perhaps she obtains them without a prescription. I am not accusing—I am simply suggesting possible reasons a person might deny having taken such medication. It happens frequently.”

  “Have you handed out any barbiturates on this trip?”

  “As it happens, no—though I don’t think your question is quite proper, Mr. Cobb.”

  “Excuse it, please. I was just thinking that if Miss Clayton has been poisoned—”

  “By whom?” the doctor demanded. “Why?”

  I ignored him. “If she has been poisoned, whoever did it had to get the stuff somewhere.”

  Dr. Sato laughed in time with the opening notes of “That’s Life.” “Mr. Cobb, sleeping pills are among the most commonly prescribed drugs in the world, certainly in America, next only to tranquilizers and diuretics. ‘Whoever’ might have gotten them anywhere. Not, however, on the Caribbean Comet.”

  “Okay, fine. What happens to Miss Clayton now?”

  “She is very weak; she will sleep now. Upon awakening, she will perhaps have a headache. I have told her to come see me if that is the case.”

  “Come see you? Aren’t you going to keep her here?”

  Dr. Sato bowed. “I made such a suggestion. She greeted it with scorn. When I said she should be kept under observation, she said you and someone named Jan could observe her as well as anyone. With that, I must concur. It is merely a precaution, and this Jan person, I was given to understand, was once an airline stewardess, so her training should be adequate to what’s needed. We have a wheelchair available to see her back to her cabin. Or wherever.”

  “Fine. You just keep observing her for a while. There’s something I have to check out first.”

  He looked concerned. “I trust you will return before eleven o’clock, if at all possible.”

  “What happens at eleven o’clock?”

  “I join the ship’s orchestra in the main lounge. I sing Frank Sinatra songs. “He gave me a few bars of “The Summer Wind.” He sounded pretty good, except for a little trouble with the words “blowing” and “across.” I told him I hoped to be back in plenty of time. He let me in to see Kenni. She started trying to get up, but I pushed her back and told her to rest for a couple of minutes. She didn’t like it. Either she resented Dr. Sato’s implication that she was lying about what medicine she had taken, or she just couldn’t stand Sinatra. I’d ask her later. I’d ask her a whole lot of stuff later; right now, my overpowering urge was to have another chat with Watson Burkehart, on the off chance that he had arranged this as a subtle way to add urgency to my quest for five Gs to give him.

  On analysis, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I was pissed off, and I wanted a piece of somebody, so I avoided analysis. I used the purser’s letter to get me into crew quarters, and went straight to Burkehart’s door, figuring since he had copped out on tonight’s meal by saying he was sick, he was bound to be stuck in his cabin.

  No answer. I tried a few other doors, met a few members of the crew. I learned two things. Nobody knew where Burkehart was, and nobody much gave a damn.

  I tried one more door and ran into my friend Clem, the cook. He did not seem a lot more sober than he had the last time I saw him, but he still thought I was great. I had hardly finished telling him I was looking for Burkehart, who was supposed to be in his cabin but didn’t answer the door, when Clem got to his feet, roared down the hall, and with a meaty shoulder, popped the hatch open.

  Well, I thought, that’s one way to make sure. I ambled along behind.

  “The bloody bugger,” Clem said alliteratively. “He’s done a bunk.”

  I gestured for Clem to move some of his bulk so I could take a look. Clem, still on his b kick, said “The bastard,” then moved aside.

  The cabin was empty, and the porthole was standing open, wasting the ship’s air-conditioning money on the muggy Caribbean night. Moonlight on wave crests made a path right to a silver beach that was my first look at St. David’s Island.

  I remembered Burkehart telling me how easy it was to swim from the ship’s current position to the island. It had to be that much easier, now.

  I took a look around while Clem, with obvious glee, went to tell the purser the Acting Chief Dining Room Steward had jumped ship. Unlike Schaeffer, Burkehart had taken stuff with him; clothes, wallet, things like that.

  Then I reminded myself that Schaeffer had disappeared in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from anything to swim to, and that he was too broad in the shoulders to even dream of slipping through a porthole, and stopped worrying about finding subtle differences.

  When Clem got back, I headed back to sick bay to get Kenni. I was confused and frustrated. Before Dr. Sato went back in and closed the door, I could hear him singing “That’s Life.”

  13

  “...Fun and adventure wait for you on this mysterious isle...”

  —Theme song,

  “Treasure Isle” (ABC)

  SO THE SHIP DOCKED in the morning. Passengers, who had apparently been dying to wave to somebody since the ship pulled out of New York, gathered on deck to wave to the brightly clothed Davidians, smiling all the while. The brightly clothed Davidians (presumably the ones who weren’t on the back side of the island, working in the guano plant) smiled and waved back. I couldn’t blame them. When someone has spent something over a thousand bucks just to get to you to buy souvenirs, it’s bound to bring a smile to your face.

  I saw the welcoming throng through the porthole of my cabin. I was still looking after Kenni, who insisted that she was now fine, and wanted to get in on the fun.

  “Isn’t it fun to pet a pedigreed Samoyed?” I demanded. “He’s certainly enjoying it. Have a little consideration for your fellow creatures. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to bring him on shore.”

  Kenni wanted to know why not.

  “Rabies and distemper quarantine. In England, you have to keep the dog locked up for six months to make sure he’s okay.”

  Kenni was petulant. “Well, I’m okay now.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Lying down in an air-conditioned cabin. But it’s eighty-eight degrees and humid out there. You just relax. You can have fun this evening.”

  “I don’t know why I let you boss me around. I’m not even the person who won your damned contest.”

  I grinned. “You’re b
eautiful when you pout. Childish, but beautiful.”

  “I am not childish.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked at the wall. Then she got a flash of how she must have looked, and started to laugh.

  “That’s better,” I said.

  “But Matt, I’ll probably never get a chance like this again. I don’t want to miss the whole trip because I got an upset stomach.”

  “Remember what the doctor said?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Him. He thinks I OD’d on a drug cocktail, for God’s sake. I never took a sleeping pill in my life.”

  “You took the seasickness pill?”

  “I told you that. Everybody else was feeling it, so when I got a little twinge, I took some. It’s not a big deal.”

  “No,” I said. “The big deal is that there was barbiturate in you. Not a fatal dose or anything, just enough to make you sick.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because between us, we pissed off Dr. Sato with our skepticism. He scraped some vomit off your skirt and ran a test on it. He sent me the results. No doubt about it.”

  “But I diddent take any!”

  “I believe you,” I told her. “Which means someone had to slip them to you.”

  “You mean someone tried to poison me?” Her voiced squeaked a little when she said “poison.”

  “Well,” I said, “yeah. Whoever it was didn’t try too hard, considering the dosage Dr. Sato figures you got, but I would have to say a person slipping another person goofballs unbeknownst probably doesn’t have the recipient’s best interests at heart.”

  “But that’s ridiculous.”

  “I agree.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s ridiculous. Just like it’s ridiculous for a well-known man, a celebrity surrounded by adoring fans, to vanish on a ship in the middle of the ocean. It’s ridiculous for Watson Burkehart to have greased his hips and slithered out through a porthole when he thought I was going to pay him five thousand dollars to tell me where Schaeffer is. And it’s ridiculous that every time I drop my fork in the dining room, a hundred maniacs whip out their notebooks and write ‘Cobb drops fork; picks it up with left hand.’ ” I rubbed my head. “At least that part’s innocent. The rest is pretty damned sinister. Especially the part about slipping drugs to you.”

  The tip of Kenni’s tongue peeped out of the corner of her mouth, and she nodded in concentration. “I’ll tell you something else that’s ridiculous. And sinister.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The knives.”

  “What about them?”

  “They were stolen.”

  “I know they were stolen. Burkehart practically admitted he’d done it.”

  “That’s not the point. If this were a mystery story, or the scenario for one of the Palmers’ mysteries, and somebody stole a whole set of razor-sharp knives and butcher’s tools, wouldent you feel gypped if nobody turned up stabbed? It’s just, I don’t know, unsatisfying.”

  I sighed. “Yes, my dear,” I said. “In a mystery story it would be most unsatisfying. In real life, though, you have to take things where you can find them.”

  “I see what you mean,” she said sadly. “For instance, if I’m going to have any fun today at all, I’m going to have to find it right in this room.”

  “They’ve got crossword puzzle books in one of the stores,” I offered. I was feeling a little like a jailer, keeping Kenni locked up because I couldn’t catch up to anyone who’d actually done anything.

  “I don’t want to do crossword puzzles.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, anything I can do, let me know.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “Lock the door. The hatch.”

  I shrugged, and complied.

  “Now put Spot in the bathroom and come over here.” She spread her arms and grinned.

  I couldn’t help but grin back, but I said, “After what you went through last night, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to have me bouncing around on your stomach.”

  “I guess you’re right,” she said glumly.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So,” she said, “I’ll just have to bounce around on yours. Now get the hell over here.”

  Sometime later, Kenni had convinced me of her recovery. Now she was telling me she was hungry.

  “Of course you’re hungry,” I said. “You haven’t eaten anything since last night, and that didn’t hang around too long.”

  “Don’t remind me,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

  “Huh? Oh, nothing. Let’s go eat on shore.”

  “No,” Kenni said sarcastically. “You mean I don’t have to wait until tomorrow to see this island after all?”

  “Sometimes the patient knows best, after all.”

  “This is more like it. Give me ten minutes back in my cabin to put on something nice.”

  “Be careful,” I said.

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek as she walked by. “You’re sweet,” she said.

  I watched her walk down the hall, just making sure she made the twenty feet or so of hallway safely. I was sweet, but I was also nervous. We were going out because of something else I wasn’t reminding her about. Someone with access to the ship’s dining room had shown something less than concern for Kenni’s welfare. Until I knew what the hell was going on, I wasn’t keen on letting her back in there. Of course, she might get a bit hungry on the trip back to New York, but there were a couple of days before I had to worry about that.

  Tonight, we would get dressed, leave the ship, take a stroll through Davidstown, make sure we weren’t being followed (Kenni didn’t have to know about that part of it), pick a restaurant at random, and go in and eat. I was getting a little peckish, myself.

  I gave Spot a dose of affection, then filled his bowl for him. It would be another evening alone for the pooch, and I felt guilty about it. I also felt weak and kind of stupid for not having resisted Kenni’s lewd advances long enough to do what I had planned to do and find out if I could bring Spot ashore. It would have been nice to have him, in case somebody decided to try something less subtle than poisoning.

  I had no reason to think anyone would, mind you. I had no reason to think anything. The real case sometimes seemed just as much a fantasy as whatever the Palmers’ guests were up to. More. They at least had Bob Madison’s body to look at for clues.

  What did I have? One burn mark. One piece of Cycolac. One set of missing knives, which, as far as anyone could tell, had not been used for anything. One missing jerk of a mystery writer. One missing sleazeball of a dining room steward.

  And one nasty, but not especially deadly act of poisoning. And maybe possibly perhaps one missing disk jockey.

  Oh, Matthew, I told myself, come now. What could he possibly have to do with it?

  Well, how the hell should I know? What did anything have to do with anything?

  I was going nuts. I had in the past, as Lee H. Schaeffer had been inordinately impressed to find out, been involved in a few messes that I had been able to name the person responsible for. But in those cases, I always knew I could identify the mess.

  My time sense told me Kenni had been gone twenty minutes; my watch said twenty-one. She’d said she’d be gone ten. Under ordinary circumstances, I should wait another fifteen minutes at least before I started to worry. These, however, as I’d just finished explaining to myself, were far from ordinary circumstances. I gave Spot one last hasty pat on the head and hustled down the hall to Kenni’s cabin.

  It was Jan who answered the door. “I just got back from the beach,” she said. I had already deduced that from the short, white terry robe she had on, and from the pinkish sand still clinging to her sandaled feet.

  Before I could say anything, she called back over her shoulder, “It’s him, Kenni.” She turned to me and told me to come on in and have a seat.

  “She decided to take a shower,” Jan explained. I could hear the water running. “I was just about to come down the hall and te
ll you.”

  “No problem. Did you have a good time?”

  “Fantastic. I never realized before how great the beaches here were. I rented a motor scooter—”

  “With all those maniacs on the road?”

  She grinned. She was more animated and happy today than I’d seen her yet. “I stuck to the back roads. Anyway, I found this beautiful beach on the north side of the island and had it completely to myself. I hope your friends forgive me when I say I like beaches a lot better than mysteries.”

  “They won’t mind.”

  “I feel like such a fraud, being the winner of the contest.”

  I told her not to worry about it. Jan obliged by changing the subject. “Kenni looks great. I was so afraid for her last night.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “Kenni says you think someone tried to poison her.”

  “Someone did poison her. He just didn’t kill her.”

  “He?”

  “Or she. I was being grammatical.”

  Jan shuddered. “There’s a crazy person on this ship.”

  I smiled. “There are probably a hundred crazy people on this ship.”

  She didn’t find it funny. “I mean for all this weird stuff to be happening. Some maniac or something.”

  “Could be,” I said, though I didn’t entirely agree. Homicidal maniacs, for all their faults, usually have the virtue of consistency. They decide if they want to be shooters or stabbers or stranglers or poisoners or bombers and stick with the decision until they get caught or find a new hobby. What had been happening on the Caribbean Comet was crazy enough, but there was a purpose to it; I could feel it. The person behind all this was working toward some goal, at which point he (or she) would stop.

  “It’s a shame,” Jan said.

  I thought so, too, and almost said so. Then I realized that since I hadn’t been speaking aloud, and Jan had shown no evidence of ESP, she had to be talking about something else.