Killed on the Rocks Read online

  “Jesus,” I said, looking at it. “I don’t know how you manage to walk.”

  “They grow us tough out west. I think, though, boys, you’re going to have to help me get back upstairs. That boot’s not going back on today.”

  “You should have gone to the hospital when this happened,” Ralph said. “You still should.”

  “Doctors. It’s getting better without them. Soak it in cold water, take the medicine, lace the boot up tight. I’ll be fine. Besides, I won’t be going to any hospitals or anywhere else until they dig us out of here. Heard that Freed guy say something about snowmobiles. Huh. Snowmobiles are more like boats than anything else. You sure can’t get one up a hill this high.”

  Bromhead insisted he was up to being questioned, so we asked away. The first thing I wanted to hear about was Barry Dost. Bromhead’s assessment tallied pretty well with Bats Blefary’s.

  “But he’s been doing real good, lately, Barry has. Lots of ideas. Must be those books he reads, future stuff. But he got his father using a lot of new PR stuff, to keep the animals happy, you know? It was like pulling teeth to get Gabby to do some of that stuff, but Barry stood up to his old man, and Barry proved himself right.”

  “Did Mrs. Dost ever sign the prenuptial agreement?”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “An inspired guess,” I said.

  “All right, all right. I never told anyone how I sniffed out an oil well, either. Yeah, she signed it. That’s why I really don’t think Aranda had anything to do with this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you guys have a thing called cui bono? Means ‘who’s better off?’”

  “That’s what it means.”

  “Yeah, well, this cui don’t bono enough.”

  Ralph said, “Doesn’t she get anything?”

  “She gets the house in Palm Springs and the apartment in New York. She gets five million bucks, and another five million insurance. Ten million with double indemnity.”

  “You’re talking about twenty million worth of stuff, after taxes. That sounds like a pretty significant bono to me. A kid I grew up with was knifed to death over a ten-dollar basketball.”

  “You don’t know Aranda. She likes to buy things. Horses, like that. She throws parties at the Four Seasons. Have you ever seen a bunch of astrologers eat?” He shook his head. “They may be spiritual as all hell, but they don’t forget the flesh.”

  “Still and all,” Ralph said. He was appalled at the idea of twenty million bucks not being enough. I would have been, too, but I had been inured by long exposure to Show Business.

  Bromhead said, “Three years. Four and half, maybe five, if she sells the real estate. No, I’ll tell you, darlin’ Aranda had a lot more bono going for her when Gabby was alive.”

  “So who gets the rest?”

  “Barry. I get a little, but mostly it goes to Barry.”

  “If twenty million isn’t enough, how much is a little to you?”

  “Not to me, to Aranda. I honestly don’t know how much Gabby left me, and I don’t much care. Following him, I’ve made plenty of money. But I’d give it all to have him back.” He looked at me with moist eyes. “And if you don’t believe that, Mister, you can go straight to hell. Both of you.”

  “Why did he have a surf-casting rod?”

  “Huh?”

  “In the tackle room. There’s a big old surf-casting rod. Be a hell of a toss to get that into the nearest surf.”

  “Oh,” Bromhead said. “You ought to slow down a little around corners, boy. It’s easy. See, more and more, Gabby was using this place as a home base. Guess he liked it. Barry picked it out for him, you know, back when he was in college. Anyway. Gabby never really knew where he was going to go next, but if it was near the ocean, he’d want to bring that rod with him. It was his favorite one.”

  “The line on it’s all tangled,” I said.

  Bromhead frowned. “That wasn’t like Gabby. He always took care of his equipment.”

  “Well,” I sighed. “Just another little mystery for us.”

  I gave Bromhead my shoulder as we walked to the door, then recruited Calvin Gowe and Bats Blefary to help him up to his room where he could take his painkiller and soak his foot.

  I went to the bar and made a bourbon and soda for myself. Ralph had one too. He looked as exhausted as I felt. I had no idea how guys like Hercule Poirot and Doctor Fell managed it. Yes, I did. By not being real, that’s how they managed it.

  “Drinking on duty,” Ralph said, looking appreciatively at his glass. “Bad.”

  “Just one didn’t hurt. I needed it.”

  “Time for the widow?”

  “Time for the widow.”

  13

  Now here she is, the woman you’ve all been waiting for. ...

  —Pat Sajak, “Wheel of Fortune” (syndicated)

  ARANDA DOST HAD BEEN able to throw together something quiet and suitable for mourning. She wore a black turtle-neck, gray skirt, black stockings, black wedgies. She looked like the kind of English teacher junior high school kids get flaming crushes on. She sat down, shook her hair back, sniffed imperiously, looked at us and said, “Well?”

  I had ruffled a lot of feathers today. Part of it was inevitable—murder is a very un-nice activity, and you can’t be sweet about chasing someone who’s committed one. On the other hand, you can handle your face and voice and diction to keep the necessary offensiveness to a minimum, and I deliberately hadn’t done that.

  It was all part of a brain game I was playing with Aranda Dost. I didn’t know who’d killed her husband, but I had a strong feeling that she knew things I wanted to know that she’d just as soon not tell.

  She figured to be tough. Not physically, but mentally and emotionally. People who are less-than-tough don’t last as long in show business as Aranda had. And women who are less than tough rarely survive the sharklike frenzy that surrounds a newly eligible millionaire.

  So I wanted her thinking about how tough I was. I wanted as many people as possible to walk out of here saying Cobb was chewing steel wool and spitting out nails. I wanted her braced for an all-out attack.

  Which would not come.

  “Mrs. Dost,” I said, “I want to apologize for disrupting your household like this. And for anything I’ve said or done today to make you upset.” I spread my hands. “I was upset, myself. I respected your husband for a long time, and although I only spent a few hours in his company, I found myself coming to like him quite a bit.”

  “Yes,” she said. She showed me a brave little smile. “Gabriel was the most charming man I ever knew. I accept your apology, Mr. Cobb. But I thought we had agreed to be Matt and Aranda. And, of course, Ralph.” She dazzled him with her teeth.

  I smiled back. “Aranda, then. I won’t try to kid you—the situation is pretty grim. We’ve learned some useful things today, but it hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been enough. Unless you have some information for us, I’m afraid we’re all going to have to go to bed tonight with the killer still loose.”

  “I don’t know what information I could possibly give you.”

  “Neither do we. We just have to get as much as we can and sift it out later. Why don’t we start with, oh, I don’t know—tell us about what you did yesterday.”

  “All day?”

  “Sure. Take my word for it, sometimes this is a lot easier if you begin at the beginning.”

  “Oh, I know all about your experience, Matt. Gabriel didn’t like to go into negotiations without knowing as much as possible about the people he’d be dealing with.”

  “Then you probably know I have even more experience answering these kinds of questions than I do asking them. So take my word for it, and begin at the beginning.”

  So she did. I learned a lot of helpful hints about throwing a house party, especially if it involves supervising servants, but not much about the case. She took us right through the party to her bedtime, leaving a trail of sweetness and l
ight behind her. If she noticed Barry’s snit with me, she didn’t mention it. She didn’t mention Carol Coretti at all.

  The questions went on. As far as she knew, Dost was under no unusual pressure (“Of course, the usual pressure around here would crush a normal man flat,” she said); none of his business enemies had shown any sign of mental instability, there had been no threats out of the ordinary.

  “Except, of course, for that letter to the Network.” Aranda frowned. “That was a little frightening, even though it didn’t make any threats. At least not directly. And it wasn’t sent to him.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “But he was frightened by it?”

  “Oh, not him, me. I was frightened by it. I’m frightened by people who choose to live twisted lives when it’s so easy to open up to the goodness of the Cosmos. But Gabriel was such a solid man, such a whole man, that things like that just didn’t register with him. He wasn’t frightened of anything, in all the time I knew him. Jack Bromhead is the same way.”

  “Did your husband always talk about his business with you?”

  “Whenever I asked. I didn’t ask often. There was so much of it, you know.” She waved that away. “I kept up pretty well with the Network negotiations, though. I was interested because it’s show business. I sang on the Network a couple of times.”

  Ralph snapped himself up straight in his chair. “That was you?” he said. “On ‘The Theodore Farnsworth Show?’ Singing a song about a waterfall? I never dreamed.”

  Aranda smiled at him. “Have I changed all that much, Ralph?”

  “No, it’s not that. I’ve always thought you looked familiar, and don’t forget, I was just a little kid at the time—”

  “Oops,” I said. Aranda shushed me and told Ralph to go on.

  “Well, I wasn’t that little a kid. Maybe ten years old.”

  “You’re not helping yourself, Ralph,” I told him.

  “Anyway, if I’d had chart records and sung on TV, I’d tell people about it. Everybody. That’s something to be proud of.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’re sweet to say such kind things to an old lady.”

  Ralph blushed. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. I was just teasing you. You are sweet. I can see why your uncle is so proud of you. But I’m afraid that in the circles I’ve moved in since I met Gabriel, where people make deals worth a billion dollars during one phone call, and affect the lives of millions of people, maybe whole countries, having a hit record or two in your past seems kind of quaint. I’d gotten out of the habit of telling people about it. It’s so much nicer when someone like you or Matt remembers.”

  “I know it’s very early to ask this, but have you given any thought to the future now?” If this had been the nasty Matt Cobb she’d been expecting, the question would have been, “What are going to do now that your husband’s dead?” Which she wouldn’t have answered.

  Now, she answered readily. “It is early,” she said, “but I suppose I might as well begin thinking about it. I won’t be running Gabriel’s empire, or deciding who will, and I’m very glad of that. That all goes to Barry, poor boy, I hope he’s up to it. I signed a pre-nuptial agreement that will leave me well provided for—it’s more than any normal person could ever need.”

  Ralph shot me a look. I hoped Aranda hadn’t seen it.

  She went on. “Maybe I’ll go back to singing. I still vocalize every morning, you know. It’s one thing not to use a talent, but it’s another to let it rust away. Don’t you think so?”

  “I couldn’t say,” I told her. “I don’t have any talent.”

  “Don’t play coy, Matt. I suspect you’re bursting with all kinds of talents.” Her mock scolding look and the shaking of her golden head made me wish Carol Coretti were here to tell me if this was flirting or not.

  “Of course, if I do sing again, I’m going to do it under another name.”

  “Why’s that?” Ralph wanted to know.

  “Because I am a good singer, you know. I have a certain amount of pride—I’d call it artistic pride, if that didn’t sound so pretentious—and I’d want people to relate to me as a singer, rather than as a billionaire’s wife. Widow.”

  After the word “widow,” she let out a little gasp, as if appalled by the sound of it, and by what it meant. She stared into space for a few seconds, then turned back to me.

  “I’m sorry, Matt,” she said. “Is there anything else I can help with?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “We’d really like to talk to Barry, and, let’s face it, he may be in danger, running around the house on his own like that. If there’s any way you could influence him to rejoin the group, we’d appreciate it.”

  Aranda shook her head.

  “You won’t do it?” Ralph said.

  “It’s not that. It’s that I don’t really have any influence with Barry.”

  “Don’t you get along?”

  “Oh, we get along all right. At least, for the last few years we have. There was a time Barry really disliked me. I don’t think he ever got over his father and mother splitting up. Most children in that situation hang on to mad dreams that their parents will get back together, but Barry clung to them long into adulthood.”

  “Why hold it against you?” I asked. “You didn’t break his parents up.”

  “No, but I got in the way after Gabriel’s second marriage ended and he was free to go back to Barry’s mother. I’m speaking from Barry’s point of view, you understand.”

  “How about your point of view?”

  “My point of view was that I’d gotten hold of the finest man in the world, and nothing was going to—going to come between us.”

  Aranda started to mist up, but controlled herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “After that outburst this morning, I made a vow that I would control myself.”

  “It’s perfectly natural,” I said.

  “It’s perfectly foolish,” she snapped. “Haven’t I studied? Haven’t I experienced? If a friend of mine had lost someone, I would be at her side telling her that death is only a transition; that the essence, the soul, if you like, of the person she’d loved was on a different plane, a beautiful place out in space, waiting to enter the world again small and innocent as a little baby.”

  When I was in high school, I used to belong to a science-fiction film club. We met Saturday evenings in a freezing cold cellar below a restaurant in the East Thirties. One day, the guy who ran the place showed up all excited because he’d gotten hold of a very early talkie, F.P.I Does Not Answer, also known as F.P.I Antwortet Nicht. It was a German picture, shot simultaneously in German, French, and English. It started out fine, but about a half hour into the film, the faces of most of the actors changed, and they all began speaking German. It was a very unsettling experience, and the reason I am reasonably fluent in four languages today. I wanted to minimize the chances of that sort of bewilderment befalling me again.

  But by golly, here it was. The switch this time wasn’t from English to German, but from sense to gibberish. I was not, however, going to run out and become fluent in New Age. Not in this life, anyway.

  She went on at great length, going so far as to lament that with Gabriel dead, the chances of Derek getting his own show on the Network were now greatly reduced. Derek was her trance channeler. He had a hot line to Imhotep. She offered to lend Ralph and me some of her crystals, to “help us get in touch with ourselves.”

  Ralph said, “No, thanks, ma’am. My mother told me if I spent too much time getting in touch with myself, I’d go blind.”

  So much for the respectful approach. Aranda drew up as if she’d been slapped. I, of course, was unable to keep myself from dissolving in hysterics, thereby blowing my chance to slap Ralph down and switch this to a game of good-cop, bad-cop.

  “I see,” she said angrily. “Throughout history, small minds have always stood in the way of their own enlightenment.”

  I tried to apologize and start some kind of damage control, but Arand
a wouldn’t have it. The fact that I couldn’t stop laughing didn’t help.

  She pointed a red-tipped finger at me. “Last night, Mr. Cobb, you challenged me to make a prediction for you. Here it is: Gabriel will speak to you. Before you leave this house, my husband will send a message that will help you solve his murder.”

  “Any notion as to when this might be?” I asked.

  “He’d hate to sleep through it,” Ralph said.

  Aranda said quietly, “I had thought better of you, Ralph. The message will reach you, Mr. Cobb.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I assured her. It was too late to apologize, anyway. “I wish you’d predict that Barry would get a message to come in from the cold.”

  “It seems rather humiliating to ask this in my own house,” she said, “but may I go now?”

  I decided to let it slide that it was Barry’s house now, or would be as soon as the will was read. “In a minute,” I said. “One more question.”

  “What more could there be?”

  “Did you make a pass at Carol Coretti last night?”

  “A pass? What kind of pass?”

  “A two-handed bounce pass,” I said. “A sexual pass, for crying out loud. Did you?”

  “I’ve had quite enough insults from you, Mr. Cobb.”

  “It’s a shame, I’ve got plenty left. Did you come on to her?”

  “Absolutely not. Am I accused of being a lesbian, now?”

  “Actually, no. Miss Coretti is, but she doesn’t think you are. That’s why she thought it so strange you’d proposition her.”

  “I never did. And you’re a fool to listen to that kind of accusation. Those people are desperate and pathetic, and likely to say anything. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have had her in my house.”

  Her house, again.

  “If you like, I can have Miss Coretti brought here. She might apologize.” Or she might call you a lying bitch, I thought.

  “No, thank you. I prefer to ignore the whole matter. Will that be all?”

  “For now,” I said.

  “They can’t plow us out of here soon enough! God, I wish they were here now.”