Killed in Paradise Page 15

  “So why don’t they do dental work?”

  “There was no dental work. His head was smashed into more pieces than a stepped-on cannoli.”

  18

  “When you care enough to send the very best.”

  —Hallmark Cards commercial

  “HMMM,” I SAID. “I DON’T suppose, Harris, that the big blow happened to be a shot upward to the base of the skull?”

  “I like the way you assume I’ve had a look at the autopsy reports.”

  “I’d be disappointed in you if you hadn’t.” Harris would have made a terrific gossip columnist. His curiosity was insatiable, and his sources were fantastic. He specialized in secretaries. I used to think he used sex appeal, but it goes too far for that. Elderly schoolteacher types, men, the plain and the pimply, he had them all willing to tell him things. If it sits behind a desk and knows something, Harris can get what ever he wants. He says he just asks, and they tell him because he has an honest face.

  “How did you know about the shot to the occipital? Lucky guess?”

  “Then there was one,” I said.

  “Yeah. Ask that question in the hearing of the right police officers, and you could be in for an interesting time.”

  I grunted. “I’m already having an interesting time.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Anything else of interest in the report?”

  “Just that all the teeth were smashed.”

  “On purpose, to delay identification? Or just a lucky shot on the killer’s part?”

  “Oh, definitely on purpose. Four or five of the shots were devoted to smashing up the teeth. Oh, and they found the murder weapon.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think it was a custom-made, monogrammed golf club.”

  “No, it was a nice, anonymous chunk of gray limestone. The killer left it right near the body.”

  “Jolly. Anything else?”

  “No, that’s about it. Unless, of course, the cops are holding on to something to check phony confessions against. They have ways of keeping that sort of thing out of reports that might leak.”

  “How’s the Network?”

  “Girding up for the November sweeps. Routine, otherwise. The biggest thrill here at Special Projects is a nut who is threatening the Network with dire things because we, quote, ‘won’t let any smart people be on game shows,’ unquote. This persons knows it’s a conspiracy, because he or she has tried out for all of them, and been turned down every time. I’ve got the West Coast office working on it.”

  Gosh, I thought. Nut letters. Routine. It made me damn near homesick.

  The current situation, on the other hand, just made me sick.

  I bit my lip, thinking. Finally I said, “Harris, I’m going to dictate a full report on this cruise and send it to you. Listen to it, have a good laugh. If you think of anything, let me know. If anything happens to me, follow up on it.”

  “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “Probably nothing, but what’s life if you don’t play a long shot now and then?”

  I expected some wiseass remark from Harris, but I didn’t get one. He just said okay and told me to be careful. Maybe he did like me. Talk about long shots. The smart money, looking at Harris, would say he didn’t like anybody.

  I said good-bye, put the phone back on the hook, and stood there, thinking.

  Joe Jenkins was dead. Joe Jenkins had been murdered. Joe Jenkins had been murdered, weeks ago, in precisely the way Watson Burkehart had been murdered yesterday. What was the connection?

  I was the connection. One connection, anyway. I had been supervising the search for Jenkins back in New York, and I had been working Burkehart to find out what had happened to Lee H. Schaeffer. And I was tied in with Schaeffer, too, if only in shortlived, but sincere, mutual dislike.

  “I’ve got it!” I said brightly. Spot looked up at me expectantly. “I’m the killer!”

  Spot put his head back down. I guessed it wouldn’t work, at that. Still, it would be a nice twisty ending. The kind Billy and Karen liked to provide for their guests.

  All of a sudden, though, I looked more and more important to this case in ways I couldn’t understand. The one concrete result of Joe Jenkins’s disappearance had been that I replaced him on this cruise. The question presented itself: Was Joe Jenkins offed for the express purpose of getting me on the goddam boat?

  How could someone even arrange something like that? I missed Kenni. She was good at this stuff. It was hard to keep doing the questions and answers all by myself. I wondered where she was—with Mike returned and contrite, Judy wouldn’t need the moral support anymore.

  I told myself to stop it. Kenni didn’t have to answer to me for her whereabouts. Maybe she’d met some millionaire mystery collector who was sweeping her off her feet with offers to buy her her own library. I’d be happy for her, I lied to myself.

  To hell with it. She’d turn up when she turned up.

  The answer to my last question, then. It wouldn’t, in fact, have been hard for someone to arrange. Provided, of course, the person knew enough about me to know that contest had been more or less my idea, and enough about Marv Bachman to know that he was exactly the kind of pain in the ass who would wish the assignment on me for that very fact. A little iffy, perhaps, to commit murder on the strength of, but hell, that’s just a sane person’s logic. People who are willing to commit murder have a logic all their own.

  I tried to think of a few candidates, but short of Harris, which was ridiculous, I drew a blank. Then I tried to think of something, anything, that would tie this scenario with Schaeffer, Burkehart, or both, and came up with a blank in three dimensions; a void.

  There was no motive. It was driving me crazy. As far as I could tell, there was no motive for anybody to have done anything.

  No. I take it back. Burkehart might have stolen the knives to sell them for money. That was the kind of good, wholesome motive anybody could understand. Clem, the chef, had said they were Swiss-forged, a complete set of top-quality butcher’s tools. That could fetch a good price.

  Fine. So where the hell were they? They weren’t on the ship, unless, of course, Schaeffer had hidden them. Maybe I should wait for another note.

  Spot lifted his head and looked at the door. I said, “Come in,” just before the knock. Jan and Kenni walked in, looking impressed.

  “And Burkehart didn’t swim ashore with them tied around his neck, either,” I said.

  Kenni came over and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “What are you talking about?” she asked pleasantly.

  Jan looked at me with a certain amount of hostility. “How did you do that?” she demanded.

  “Do what?”

  “Say come in just before I knocked? I know we didn’t make any noise.” She pointed at her feet and Kenni’s. They both wore tennis shoes. “And we didn’t do any talking, because we’re all talked out.”

  “My God,” Kenni said. “I’m all for support groups, women together and all that, but you’d think these things could end when the woman you’re supporting gets her problem solved. I wanted to leave, but somehow, it didn’t seem polite.”

  “It wouldn’t have been,” Jan said. “But it’s beside the point. How did you know we were out there?”

  “Can’t you figure it out?”

  “I hate being mystified! I should have just let Kenni say she was me, and skipped this trip altogether.”

  I had to blink a few times before I believed my eyes. Jan, the previously imperturbable, was really upset. And not about a little mystification, either. I’d have to ask Kenni about it later.

  “Come on, Matt,” Jan said. “Stop wasting time. You didn’t see us. You didn’t hear us.”

  I looked at her, not knowing what to say. It was incredible, how upset she was.

  Finally, I turned to Kenni and said, “Tell her how I knew.”

  Kenni didn’t smile. She was apparently walking softly around Jan this afternoon. “Spot probably did something, Jan. W
e were too quiet for Matt, but not for the dog.”

  Spot got to his feet, as if to take a bow.

  Jan grumbled.

  Kenni said, “Now you can answer my question. What was that about Burkehart?”

  So I went through the whole thing again, this time with Kenni. Her only contribution, besides companionship, was, “Why is this Harris character ridiculous?”

  “Because he was in New York, doing my job. He wasn’t in Davidstown killing somebody he never met.”

  “He could have hired somebody. Or he could have made himself scarce for the afternoon. It’s what? A two hour plane ride from New York?”

  I looked at her. She was right, as far as that went. I’d come to St. David’s Island on a ship, and I’d been more or less assuming that that was how you got here. Stupid. Unless you are neurotic, and refuse to fly, nobody takes a ship to get anywhere. You take a ship because you want to be on a ship. It would be perfectly possible, weather and schedules permitting, to fly here from New York, kill Burkehart, and fly back in less than half a day.

  “But that would mean Burkehart and Jenkins had no connection with what’s happened on the ship.”

  “So?” Kenni asked. Another stumper.

  “Can you think of a motive for this man to have done all this? Killed Jenkins, sent me to sea, zoomed down here to kill Burkehart?”

  “Maybe he wants your job,” Jan suggested. She’d been sitting in the corner, sulking and morose, giving Spot a desultory pet every now and then. We’d almost forgotten she was there.

  Her eyes flashed impatiently when we looked at her. “Or maybe he just wants to make you look bad. Don’t look at me like that. Lee Schaeffer was jealous of you, why shouldn’t somebody who works for you be, too?”

  “In the abstract, no reason, granted I’m somebody to be envious of. But in this specific case, Harris could have my job in the first place. And I’ve been offering it to him ever since. Also, he constantly makes me look bad.”

  Kenni was at the desk, resting her face on her fist, tapping with the leaky room pen. She looked as miserable as Jan.

  “So what are we going to do now?” she asked.

  Good question. I thought it over for a second, and realized that what I’d been doing here for the past hour was avoiding the decision my unconscious mind had reached long ago.

  “Well, I am going to follow a principle that has served me in good stead over the years.”

  “What’s that?” Kenni wanted to know.

  “If you’re not getting anywhere being smart, do something stupid.”

  “Such as what?” Jan asked.

  “I am going to go try to pay a call on Martin Gardeno. He’s been driving me crazy.”

  “But he hasn’t done anything! Kenni said.

  “Precisely. And it bothers me. A big-time criminal, living on a small island, who has nothing whatever to do with a series of mysterious events. It’s as unsatisfying in its way as the knives nobody’s been cut with. So I think I’ll go out there and ask him why not.”

  “Count me in,” Kenni said cheerfully.

  Jan went off like a bomb.

  “Games! You people can never get away from games! Are you both crazy? This Gardeno was a Mafia boss. A killer. You might as well ask him to murder you. You make me sick! You’re both going to die!”

  19

  “And see this living legend’s fabulous home!”

  —Robin Leach,

  “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (syndicated)

  “MR. GARDENO WILL SEE you in a moment.” The butler bowed and retreated. Seeing this guy was worth the entire trip. He was old, his hands were pink-spotted and deformed with arthritis, but he stood ramrod straight and his voice was strong and smooth. I had expected to be frisked; I had expected Kenni’s bag to be searched. I hadn’t expected to be welcomed with the kind of sober politeness even the British have forgotten about.

  Kenni and I were seated in a room paneled in dark wood. There was an ornate and perfectly superfluous marble fireplace on the far wall. The chairs we sat on were covered in silk striped purple and gold, matching the curtains on the windows. Past the curtains, we could see the sun beating down on palm trees, and, way down the hill, on the white balconies of the new hotel. It was like an unwelcome message from the Twentieth Century.

  I looked around at crystal and silver and porcelain. “Crime does not pay,” I said.

  Kenni said, “What?”

  “Never mind. What were you thinking about?”

  “If the butler would smile, he would look just like Uncle Ben.”

  “So glad I asked.”

  Kenni shrugged. “Well, what were you thinking about?”

  “The ways in which the money to buy this beautiful place was earned.”

  Kenni looked severe. “Matt!” she whispered. “What if the place is bugged?”

  “What if it is? I don’t think I’m surprising anybody. If you’re nervous, you should have stayed back on the ship with Jan.”

  “I hope I never get that nervous. What’s got into her?”

  I smiled. “I was going to ask you the same thing. If you don’t know of any concrete reason, my guess is confusion overload.”

  “You say that as if it’s a recognized medical condition.”

  “Only by me. It happens all the time; not being able to do anything because it’s impossible to tell what the right thing to do is. Makes me crazy.”

  “Is that why we’re here? Because you went crazy?”

  “That’s why I’m here. You’re here because you insisted. Also because you’ve already researched the guy and the island, and you might think of something I don’t know.”

  “I’m indispensable,” she said.

  “Don’t look so smug. I don’t think we’re in any danger, but I’ve been wrong before.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “At least once or twice. Amazing, but true.”

  “The thing that amazes me,” she said, suddenly serious, “is that we got past the gate at all. That guard with the mashed nose—I thought he was going to get nasty.”

  “He wasn’t going to get nasty,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure of that. It’s somewhat disconcerting discovering a face that should be decorating a Brooklyn bookie joint in the middle of a tropical forest. “All he had to do to keep us out was keep the gate locked until we got sick of talking to him. Then what could we do? Turn around and bring the car back to the Avis office.”

  “That would have been disappointing.”

  “Especially after driving mountain roads at twenty miles an hour with my chin getting rubbed raw on the steering wheel. We should have borrowed the Cadillac from the Embassy.”

  “We would have gotten more respect from the guard.”

  “We never would have gotten in. Gardeno didn’t hole up on this island to entertain American officials. Just the opposite.”

  “Everything changed when you handed the guy your card.”

  That had done it, all right. I had been working on my “do something stupid” principle. I’d already given my name a hundred times, said I had nothing to do with the governments of the United States or St. David’s Island, and just if I could make an appointment to see Mr. Gardeno some time today or early tomorrow morning. Nothing. So I contorted myself in the compact car (the guard had sort of growled every time I got close to the door handle), reached my card case and a pen, scribbled the ship’s number on the card, and handed it to the guard. “In case he changes his mind,” I said as I handed it to him, knowing even as I did so that the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of the card becoming part of the talus on the floor of the forest before we were even out of sight.

  The Brooklyn Boy looked at the card and his face lit up as though it had a thought behind it. He said we should wait, then went back into his little air-conditioned cabin and picked up a phone.

  I’m not a great lip-reader, but I’m okay. I know he spoke the words “Boss” and “Network” several times, and I
thought I picked out “Let him know” near the end.

  Finally, he popped out of the booth, leaned down (way down) to the car window, and said, “Okay. You can go in. I’m taking a chance. If you make me look bad, I’ll get real upset. I don’t have to stay on this island, you know. Times are, I’d be glad to be deported. Understand me?”

  The honest answer to that was “Huh?” but I was being polite. I just told him we wouldn’t dream of making him look bad, and drove through the gate before he changed his mind.

  So here we were. I didn’t know about Kenni, but I was irritated. I’d come here to try to get some answers, and all I’d gotten was more stuff that didn’t make sense.

  I kept telling myself we were perfectly safe. Jan was our life insurance. Gardeno had to keep his nose perfectly clean on St. David’s Island. The government was dying for an excuse to deport him, and back in the States, the Justice Department drooled at the thought of getting their hands on him. If anything happened to us, if we disappeared, for example, Jan could go to Buxton and swear out a statement that Kenni and I had intended to, and had taken steps toward, visiting Martin Gardeno. That would be enough for Buxton to come down on this place like a ton of guano. Gardeno didn’t want that kind of trouble.

  I kept telling myself all that. When I found myself insisting on it to myself with growing anger at myself for not entirely believing it, I started looking around for something else to think about.

  It wasn’t necessary. The butler came in, showed us another little bow, and said, “Mr. Gardeno will see you now.”

  The butler led us down a hall and into a room. We stepped from Edwardian England to Italian Brooklyn before we could blink. The room was filled with television sets and junk. There were five sets, all color, all expensive, on a specially built set of shelves. Every set was on, each to a different channel. Facing the set was an enormous green leather reclining chair. The back of it was big enough to show movies on. Either the chair was on fire, or its still-invisible occupant was smoking an especially foul cigar. Blue-gray smoke curled up from the chair and became part of the general haze that filled the top third of the room, impervious to the best efforts of an expensive air-conditioning system.