Killed in Paradise Page 2

“If they keep the jackets on, no one will notice the hair under their arms.”

  “Oh, very funny.”

  “Come off it, Marv,” I told him. “These tropical cruise things are like singles’ bars that never close. Bringing a boyfriend on one of these things would be like bringing a can of Spam to a butcher shop.”

  Marv squinted at me over his cigar. “That why you’re going alone? Looking to cut off a slice for yourself?”

  I ignored him. I have no trouble meeting women—I just happen to meet women who have demanding careers and can’t get away for a week in the middle of October on short notice. I’d asked two of them before I got discouraged. I decided it was probably just as well. I’d make more brownie points for the Network if I devoted all my energy to making sure our winners were happy without personal considerations coming in the way. As long as I’d been roped into this, might as well do it right.

  On that same theory, I got up a little early the Saturday morning the trip was supposed to start and commandeered a Network’s limousine, complete with a driver, to take everybody to the pier. Janice Cullen and Ms. Kenni Clayton lived on West 120th Street, a former hotel remodeled twelve years ago or so to studio apartments. Morningside Heights has never been as bad a neighborhood as some, due to the presence of Columbia University in its midst. There is, however, room for improvement, a lot of which has already been made. Still, I think it’s safe to say that this was the nicest car that had parked on that particular block in quite some time that didn’t have a crack dealer in it.

  The building itself was quite nice, the nicest one on the block. You may have heard the word “gentrification.” This is how it works in New York: Somebody puts a nice building in a borderline or outright scummy neighborhood, then charges (this is the key here) a rent that’s only slightly silly instead of downright outrageous. Some brave people move in. These can be brave New Yorkers unable to resist a bargain, or new arrivals suffering culture shock over Manhattan rents. Anyway, with luck, most of them live, so the developer fixes up another building, for which he can charge more, since there are now two decent buildings, making it a better neighborhood, and so on. By the time the whole block is fixed up, nobody can afford to live there, and the process starts all over again somewhere else.

  I told Spot to wait in the car while I went and collected our lucky winners. It occurred to me that if these women wore tweed suits, for whatever reason, I’d have to keep Spot well clear of them. Spot is a Samoyed, a breed of medium-sized Siberian sled dog with pointy ears, a cloud of pure white fur, and a perpetual grin on his black lips. Spot was the reason I could keep my interest in the New York apartment market strictly academic. Spot lived in a fabulous condominium on Central Park West, and I was watching both him and it for their true owners, Rick and Jane Sloan, who had spent the last several years doing archeological things in hot, humid places where people were likely to express a savage dislike of Americans at any moment.

  If I had their money, I’d stay home with the air conditioner on, watch the Discovery Channel on cable, and have all my meals catered, but to each his own. Until they returned, I had the living conditions (and the dog) of the fabulously wealthy.

  Anyway, since this was fall, Spot wouldn’t be shedding. Too much. For a Samoyed. These things are relative. It would still be a good idea to keep him away from tweed.

  I pushed the Cullen button on the intercom. A pleasant voice chirped back. “Who’s there?”

  “Matt Cobb,” I said. “From the Network. All ready to go, Miss Cullen?”

  “What? Oh. No.”

  I smiled. The driver had resented being routed out on a Saturday morning, especially when he found out I had things arranged for us to arrive at the terminal some one hundred minutes before we’d be able to board, maybe three hours before the ship pulled out. I told him I knew women, but that was a lie. What I know is that I don’t know women. It helps you prepare.

  “It’s all right, Miss Cullen,” I said. “We’ve got plenty of time, and the car will wait.”

  “No,” the voice said again.

  “I assure you it will; the Network owns the car, and I’m a vice president.”

  “No, no, no.”

  It was like talking to a two-year-old. Three minutes into this project, and the suave, perfect-host persona was shot.

  “I am, too, a vice president, goddammit! One of hundreds, maybe, but I swing enough weight to get a goddam limousine to wait as long as it takes you to get ready. And if you don’t want to go on the goddam cruise, it’s all the same to me. The Giants are playing tomorrow. And another thing—”

  I stopped, because two young women with suitcases were standing behind the glass door, laughing at me. They opened the door. “Hello, Mr. Cobb,” the small, dark one said. She had a smoky voice, reminiscent of oiled sandpaper. It was very sexy, but it didn’t really go with her dimples or just-short-of-plump curves. She looked like she ought to be bouncy and bright, until you caught sight of her eyes. They were very mature eyes, the eyes of what a friend of mine calls a “Serious Person.”

  She should have switched voices with the chirper, who was tall and handsome and had a lovely head of hair the color of old bronze. I could not see her eyes, because she was wearing sunglasses. However, since she was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts over bare (and very nice) legs, and Roman-type sandals, it was a safe deduction she was not a Serious Person.

  I was a little cheesed off. Looking like a fool frequently does that to me. My self-censor circuits had temporarily shut down. I looked her over and said, “You forgot your beach ball.”

  She took it in a lot better spirit than I had intended it. She laughed like bubbles and said, “Oh, Mr. Cobb, I’m sorry. I got us tangled all up and diddent know how to get out. We were ready to go...”

  “Actually, you’re ready to be there. We’ve got a couple of days of untropical weather ahead of us yet.”

  The smaller one smiled wryly. “I’ve told her that.”

  “I know it, Jan. I don’t mind a little chill.” She looked over at the limo. “Although I may be a little underdressed for that car...” She shrugged it off and stuck out her hand. “Anyway, the problem is, you were talking to me, but you thought I was Jan. I’m Kenni Clayton, but I couldent figure out how to tell you unless we came down in person.”

  I took her hand. It was a nice hand. Jan Cullen’s hand was a little softer than perfection, but still nice. I said my name a few more times. I called the driver; he and I got the bags stashed in the car—not many, considering we’d be gone a week, and at least twice be expected to dress for dinner—and at last we were under way.

  “Spot, stop that,” I said. Jan Cullen and I were on the bench; Kenni Clayton had taken one of the jump seats, and absolutely refused my offer to switch. I was just as glad, since I get sick riding backward. Spot was on the floor, rubbing himself against Kenni’s long white legs. Maybe he thought they were cold.

  “I don’t mind,” Kenni said. We were all on a first-name basis by now, which was cozy. “He’s such a beautiful dog.” Everybody says that. “Samoyeds are my favorites. I used to have a dog, but I just couldent keep one cooped up in the apartment all day.”

  Jan Cullen spoke for the first time since the car got rolling. “You can have a dog in New York if you want to, Kenni. Other people do. The dogs don’t mind. Matt obviously does it, and the dog looks fine.”

  I laughed. “It’s his apartment.” I told them the tale. “I wonder how he’s going to take to a cabin.”

  Kenni was aghast. “You’re bringing him?”

  “The Sloans didn’t leave me many instructions, but the ones they left they were vehement about. The Arbors is the only kennel in the world, let alone New York, that is good enough for our little Spot, and there were no vacancies, except for one weekend in November, between now and the end of the year. So if the Network wants me on the trip, they get the dog.”

  Jan Cullen looked at me strangely. I knew what was on her mind, but she was being tactful
. Tact, I was beginning to suspect, was not Kenni Clayton’s strong suit. She bent over and scratched Spot under his muzzle, a move guaranteed to send him into immediate ecstasy. With her other hand, she raised the sunglasses and looked at me quizzically with very pretty gray eyes. “Why in the world is he called Spot?”

  Beside me, Jan Cullen smiled. Now I knew why she hadn’t bothered to ask. I suppressed a sigh. That question always comes within five minutes of “what a beautiful dog.”

  “They named him,” I said, “for the gigantic white spot that covers his entire body.”

  Jan said, “Of course.” Kenni said it was cute.

  “Kenni,” I said, “is an unusual name.”

  Kenni made a face. “A whole lot better than Mary Kenneth. My mother told my father just before I was born that if I turned out to be another girl, she’d rather raise a daughter named Kenneth than get pregnant a sixth time. So I’m Mary Kenneth Clayton. Yuck. Kenni will do fine.”

  I barely heard her. I was caught up in the picture of some town somewhere between Baltimore and Philadelphia (judging from her accent) with four more like Kenni in it.

  When I tuned back in, Kenni was talking to Jan. “...so excited, thanks again for bringing me along, Jan. I don’t know when I’d ever get the chance to do this on my own.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Jan said. “I’d probably have asked you to come along, anyway, but considering you won the contest for me, I couldn’t very well have left you home.”

  Kenni smiled impishly. “No, I guess you couldent.” These are not typographical errors, by the way—diddent, couldent, wouldent—this is the way she talked, as if all her contractions were brands of toothpaste.

  Jan turned to me. “I was destined to go back to St. David’s Island,” she said.

  “Back?”

  She nodded. “When I was flying, the old regime there tried to promote tourism. They talked Columbia Airways into running a couple of flights a week there. I filled in once. It didn’t work out.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “They didn’t realize you need more than beaches and weather to make a resort. Like hotels and restaurants and things to do at night.”

  “They’re supposed to have rectified that.”

  “So I understand,” she said. “Anyway, it was such a bizarre combination of circumstances that led to my winning this contest. I had just hung up the phone after a wrong number, or my line would have been busy and they would have called somebody else. Kenni just happened to be there, dropped in for a cup of coffee, when the phone rang and that disk jockey—what’s his name?”

  “Joe Jenkins.”

  “When Joe Jenkins called—”

  Kenni broke in. “Is his disappearance part of the mystery? On the ship? That we’re supposed to solve?”

  I told her I didn’t think so.

  Jan laughed. “You see what I mean. I just manage to get the phone call, and I just happen to have a mystery nut dropping in, so when Jenkins asked me the bank some character worked for—”

  “John Putnam Thatcher, by Emma Lathen,” Kenni said, authoritatively. “The Sloan Guaranty Trust.”

  “—we were on our way to the Islands.”

  Spot now had his head on Kenni’s knee. A mystery expert, eh? “What if he’d asked you who Emma Lathen really is?”

  “Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart.”

  “You’re not going to get her that way,” Jan said. “Kenni is in charge of the children’s room at one of the branch libraries. And unofficial mystery buyer for the whole New York Library System. She reads this stuff for a living.”

  I smiled at her. “Nice work, if you can get it.”

  “There’s the terminal,” Jan said.

  Kenni wiggled. It’s hard for a tall woman to wiggle with joy gracefully, but Kenni managed it. “I’m so excited. Yes, it’s a fine job, and I love it, but it gets to be awfully routine. That’s why I’ve gone native so soon. I’m sick of wearing a damned tweed suit all the time.”

  I couldn’t even tell her what I was smiling about.

  4

  “Let’s look in and see what’s going on at the party.”

  —Dan Rowan

  “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” (NBC)

  WE WERE VIPS. IT said so right on the little envelope next to the fruit basket, under the bottle of champagne on the dresser in my cabin. It was an invitation from Captain Lars Gustafson; to a Captain’s Reception in the Starview Lounge on the bridge deck. Dress was informal, which, I reflected, was good news for Kenni. I toned myself down to a sports jacket, turtleneck, and clean jeans. If the captain didn’t like it, I’d come back to the cabin here and take a nap.

  There were a couple of things I wanted to do before I went upstairs. Excuse me. “Above.” There are two kinds of people—those who can pick up nautical terminology and those who can’t. I can, but the minute I hit land again, I forget it all. At various points of our tale here, I’m just as likely to say bathroom for head and stairs for ladder and floor for deck as not. Forgive it please. Also forgive the lack of detailed statistics about the ship (not boat). They’re not important. All you have to know is that there were five decks and a bilge, the ship drew about twenty feet of water, and it was going to go about thirty-five knots, weather and current permitting, all the way to St. David’s Island.

  The crew was as stratified as British society of the nineteenth century.

  Captain Gustafson and all the officers were Norwegian. The ship, though American owned, was Norwegian registered. The ship’s engineer was a Scot. I found out that all ship’s engineers in the Free World are Scots. It’s like a rule. The actual crew, the people who worked hard and sweated, and whom we never saw, were Filipinos. The cabin stewards were Koreans. Everybody else who dealt with the passengers (the Cruise Staff, the literature called them) were Americans, except for the people in the kitchen and the dining room, who were Davidians, and the ship’s surgeon, who was Japanese, and don’t ask me how he got there. Don’t worry about any of these people except for the captain, Dr. Sato, and a few others, whom we will get to in time.

  Where was I? Right. Two things I wanted to take care of before I collected our winners and went above. First I read the rest of the literature—“Welcome to the S.S. Caribbean Comet,” containing all the information I just gave you and lots more; “If You Bring Your Pet,” containing rules which I considered reasonable for keeping a dog with you on the trip, and please, won’t you let us make him comfortable in the hold?; and the ship’s newspaper, which reported events on the ship on one side of a mimeographed sheet, and nodded toward the happenings in the Outside World on the other. There was no mention of Tropical Storm Iris, now brewing in the direction we were heading, but what the hell. The ship held a thousand passengers; it was bringing about seven hundred this trip. At least a hundred of those, Billy and Karen’s mystery fans, could read, and everybody had access to a radio or TV set. If we were assholes enough to take off across the ocean in the middle of the hurricane season, served us right.

  The other thing I wanted to do was introduce Spot to the cabin steward. The rules in the brochure didn’t say we’d appreciate it if you could keep your attack-trained pet from reducing our cabin staff to a pile of bloody hunks, but you can’t think of everything.

  There were two bunks in my cabin, which struck me as a little strange, since even if I had been able to get a date I doubt we would have used two bunks, and each one had a little button near it. I pushed it, hoping it wasn’t a fire alarm or something.

  He was knocking on the door almost before my finger left the button, and I had a vision of the winter provisions of an entire village in Korea depending on the size of the tip I gave Kim.

  That was his name, he said. When I told him that would have been my first guess, his smile changed from the pasted-on one of eager subservience to one that took me in as a human being. I appreciated it.

  I introduced Kim to Spot and vice versa. I told Spot Kim was his friend. Spot would hav
e to take my word for it. Smile A was back on Kim’s face. He said, moving his lips as little as possible, “Russian dog.” I got the impression he did not like Russians.

  “A defector,” I assured him. “Generations ago. True-blue American.”

  Kim shrugged and left it at that. Then he said something that was undoubtedly the Korean for “What a beautiful dog,” and scratched Spot behind the ear. Then he smiled, bowed, and left.

  He didn’t know it, but he had raised his tip twenty percent. He was the first person ever not to ask me why he was called Spot.

  The Starview Lounge was built above the bow of the ship, with big windows all around. Right now, of course, the only star in view was the sun, and the air conditioners were striving mightily to counteract the greenhouse effect. I was eating Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers and drinking club soda with lime, six ounces a shot. I can hold six ounces of club soda in my mouth, but I had given up trying to get bigger glasses, and was ordering them two at a time. Jan Cullen was sitting beside me, drinking Campari and soda. Kenni was mingling. I stayed with Jan because, no matter who knew where John Putnam Thatcher worked, Jan was the official contest winner, and Kenni needed no help in mingling.

  “She’s amazing, isn’t she?” Jan didn’t seem to think the question needed an answer. “Who’s that she’s talking to now?” She made an unobtrusive gesture with her glass in the direction of a large, heavy guy with black-and-white hair and a beard to match.

  “Oh, that’s my writer friend. Philip DeGrave. He’s the one who introduced me to the Palmers and some of the other writers on this trip.”

  “Philip DeGrave?”

  “A woman named Kenni should get along with him just fine. He named his son Doug, I guess to prove he has a sense of humor. That’s his wife next to him. She’s a writer, too. Nicola Andrews.”

  Jan looked mildly surprised. “Oh. I’ve heard of her.”

  “Sure,” I said. I took a sip of club soda. “I figure if your best friend is a librarian, you’ve got to read something just to be polite.”