Killed in Paradise Page 4

  Some people were showing what old hands they were by grousing about having to go through this again. Some people were treating it like a lark. After opening my mouth once, I decided to take it all stoically.

  Then Kenni, standing beside me, gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Where’s Spot?”

  “He goes down with the ship,” I said.

  “You wouldent!” She was serious.

  “Of course not,” I assured her. “He gets my place. I just put the Mae West on him, then I go down with the ship. Once his owners got hold of me, I might as well have, anyway.”

  “Matt, this izzent funny! You’re responsible for that dog.”

  “Well, if we get in trouble, you can talk one of these nice people into giving up his seat for a dog. Good luck.”

  The stewardess started to read off names and cabin numbers. Jan turned to me and whispered. “I know one person I wouldn’t mind seeing miss the boat.” She pointed discreetly back over her shoulder.

  I looked, but I heard him before I saw him. In our little bunch for boat Number 21, Lee H. Schaeffer, holding forth in a stage whisper to the effect that this was all a waste of time. Very few people had the guts to take proper action in a crisis. In an emergency, all would be panic and chaos, and those who couldn’t keep their wits about them would drown like rats.

  Kenni shuddered. “Spot can have my seat. I wouldent get on a life raft with him.”

  “Yeah, but what a writer. ‘Drown like rats.’ I wonder where that came from? Did you ever try to drown a rat? I have seen a social-climbing rat swim clear across the Hudson from New Jersey, climb up on a dock, pull over a garbage can, and begin to eat.”

  “Do you think there are rats on this ship? Four-footed ones, I mean.” Jan looked apprehensive as she asked, damn near scared. So I said no. Actually, there probably were some. I read somewhere that every vessel above a certain size is bound to have rats. But I’m a New Yorker. If they stay away from the room I’m in, that’s all I ask.

  Finally they stopped calling names, they showed us how to jump into the water without breaking our necks on the life jackets, and they let us go. I checked my watch and saw I could still get something like a decent nap before the mystery cruise briefing, and offered to carry Jan and Kenni’s purchases back to their cabin.

  Schaeffer caught up with us before I reached the stairs. Ladder.

  “Cobb!”

  “Yes, Schaeffer?” He squinted at me, perturbed for a second. I think he expected me to call him Mister.

  “I’ve been asking around about you.”

  “Whatever for? I’m no celebrity.”

  “People who get involved in murders interest me.”

  “It isn’t fun. I much prefer mystery novels.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it would be, when your best friend is arrested in a messy sex scandal.”

  I looked at him. He really was a remarkable phenomenon. He was taller than I was, and absolutely rectangular. He had a long neck, but no discernible waist. With his shock of carefully blow-dried, black hair, he looked as if someone had stuck a wig on a folded lawn chair. There wasn’t much to see in the way of muscle, but the muscle was there. I could feel the strength in him when he’d clapped me on the shoulder to get my attention.

  He was leaning toward me, now. Not exactly leaning—it’s hard to lean without a waist. It was as if he were hinged in the middle, like a garage door, and the top half had slid toward me. He had an okay face. His eyes were intelligent and fierce. I was beginning to dislike him as much as he disliked me.

  “No,” I said quietly. “It was a drag.”

  “Or one of your employees turns out to be a triple murderer.”

  “One of my subordinates. He was the Network’s employee. As a writer, you should be more careful with words.” I suppressed a grin as I saw him flinch. I went on before he could say anything.

  “But no, that was no fun, either. I can only think of five times in my life, including right now, when I’ve had less fun. Do you have a point, or are you just trying to ruin my trip?”

  People were coming up. Schaeffer lost the glare and gave me the smile of good fellowship. “No such thing. I’m trying to add a little excitement.”

  “If I wanted excitement, I would have stayed in New York and watched a football game.”

  “That’s the other thing I found out about you. You’re quite an athlete.”

  “I played basketball in college. Wednesday nights when I’m free, I play volleyball at a grade school gym on the West Side. Why?”

  Schaeffer looked sly. “I thought we might engage in a little friendly competition.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I was beginning to doubt Schaeffer and I could engage in a little friendly anything.

  “A round of golf when we get to the Island?” he asked.

  “Never played the game,” I told him.

  He clicked his tongue. “And you an executive.”

  “I could never see the point of walking after a stationary ball, hitting it into a stationary hole, then telling yourself you’re an athlete.”

  “Tennis, then.”

  “You know all these rich man’s games, Schaeffer.”

  We were being childish, and I knew it. Doesn’t mean I could stop. Males strutting in front of females was bred into us when it made a difference to the survival of the species that the ones with the most muscles got to reproduce. I suspect it’s going to take rationality a million years or so to catch up with evolution.

  Kenni would have made a good Cro-Magnon woman. She had latched onto my arm and was looking daggers at the interloper. Jan, on the other hand, seemed to know how big a couple of assholes we were being—she had her back turned to us, studying rivets in the bulkhead like an apprentice boat builder.

  “Come on, Cobb,” he said. “I’m almost half again your age. You can’t be afraid of me.”

  And like a jerk, I let it sting me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this business, but I absolutely was not going to leave the slightest idea in Jan’s or Kenni’s mind that I was afraid of him, either.

  “They’ve got a gym on this ship, right?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “A Nautilus.” He grinned. “You want to lift? Against me?”

  “You want to go one-on-one hoops against me?” He didn’t answer. I went on. “Are they set up for table tennis?”

  “Table tennis?”

  “Ping,” I said. “Pong. You know.”

  “Ho. They have one. You’re going to wish we lifted. As soon as we get to port.”

  I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Tonight. The sea is flat as glass, and you’re going to make my life a goddam misery until we get this over with. Right after Billy and Karen’s little mystery game.”

  “Ten o’clock, then.”

  “Ten o’clock it is. Ladies, shall we go?”

  “Just a minute, Cobb.”

  “Now what?”

  “How about a little wager.”

  I turned to him and smiled. “Sure, I said. What did you have in mind?”

  “A hundred dollars?”

  “A hundred dollars? But Schaeffer, you’ve had six best-sellers and three hit movies, plus a TV show. You must be a millionaire. A hundred dollars must be nothing to you.”

  “I didn’t want to make it too rich for you.”

  “I quote a well-known fictional detective: ‘The worst thing about money is that it makes people who have it think they’re worth something.’ ”

  “That’s mine. You have better taste than I thought.”

  “I never said you couldn’t write. I just think you’re full of it. But that’s beside the point. There are things other than money to bet.”

  “Name it.”

  “Loser gets up in front of the Bogie’s group at the earliest possible opportunity, announces the result of the game, and declares himself to be an asshole.”

  “You su
re you want to admit that to everybody?”

  “If I lose, I’ll do it. How about you?”

  He stuck out his hand and we shook on it. He tried to give me a crusher, but I squeezed back and managed to avoid any lasting damage. I already knew he was stronger than I was.

  He finally went, after giving me his cabin number “in case you want to call it off.” Turned out his was directly above mine, two decks up. Which explained how he got assigned to our boat.

  As we walked down to our cabins, Jan shook her head and said, “Men. Do you honestly think women are impressed by that stuff?”

  I said I guessed not. I said I supposed it was pretty stupid. On the other hand, I remembered how it felt with Kenni holding on to my arm, and I knew I couldn’t have turned this down for all of Schaeffer’s money.

  6

  “Your mission, should you decide to accept it...”

  —Bob Johnson

  “Mission: Impossible” (CBS)

  AND THEN THERE WAS the briefing, and a totally different Schaeffer showed up. He was charming, he was gracious, he answered all questions, even the most stupid, with patience and humor. The fans loved him, and I couldn’t say I blamed them.

  I was sitting unobtrusively in the back of the room. I didn’t really need to be there—I wasn’t one of the celebrity suspects, and I wasn’t one of the contestants, so I could have skipped it and milked my nap, or played with Spot, or eaten another banana from my fruit basket. I was here, I suppose, continuing my self-appointed Sir Galahad over Jan and Kenni. I guessed it was working. As Schaeffer was gracious for his fans, he occasionally sent searching looks toward our contest winners, especially at Jan (I supposed he had given up on Kenni), but he never came within twenty-five feet of them.

  We were in a small auditorium. It had blue-green curtains and seat upholstery and was a dead ringer for Network Screening Room D. Except of course that Network Screening Room D was not susceptible to hurricanes. That wasn’t a problem at the moment, though. The weather was still calm, and the deck concrete-solid beneath us.

  Billy got up on the small stage, and asked all the celebrities to join him. He introduced them as the characters they were supposed to play in the week-long mystery, which was a 1930s missing-heir plot. All that was missing was Charlie Chan or Philo Vance, and the idea was for the contestants (split up into groups of ten) to cast themselves in those roles.

  I looked out at the faces of the mystery cruisers. Some I knew from my visits to Bogie’s; some were, and would remain, complete strangers to me. Karen had said people had come from as far as Seattle to be part of this. Every one of them was eager and excited. I thought of hounds baying to be let loose at the fox, and similar clichés. This murder was going to be such fun.

  Real murders, I thought, aren’t fun. They grow out of greed and fear and jealousy, and they leave you feeling dirty, even when you manage to catch up with whoever did it.

  Maybe Schaeffer was right. I mean, I liked to say that murders kept finding me against my will, but the fact remained that four times now, I had found myself ass-deep in them. There was no law that required me to get involved, just a job I didn’t especially like and—

  And what? I asked myself. Maybe a deeper, realer, more intense (and therefore less wholesome) form of the same excitement the people around me felt? Did I secretly enjoy poking my nose in piles of festering human emotions looking for the germ that had started the decay?

  I had never thought about this before, and it bothered me. Then the fact that I never had thought of it before bothered me in and of itself. I’m not a great big fan of modern psychology, but it stands to reason that if you suppress something, you are probably aware of it. I was making myself depressed.

  And while I was at it, I spent some time depressing myself with the thought that maybe everybody’s favorite conceited old fart would wipe me out at Ping-Pong. What did I know? Maybe in between workouts, he rallied with the Red Chinese national team.

  I sighed, then told myself to cut it out. By the time I tuned back in, Billy’s briefing was over, so I didn’t, and haven’t to this day formed, any clear idea of what that mystery game was supposed to be. It turned out not to matter.

  Just before we adjourned, Billy announced the Great Ping-Pong match that night, and said he was sure everybody would want to attend. I was going to have to talk to that boy.

  The next stop was the dining room. First night was informal, which suited me fine, since there wasn’t time to get into my tux.

  They had arranged a little ghetto for the mystery-writing types. I was in at a small table at the fringes of it, along with Jan and Kenni, Mike Ryerson and his wife Judy, and the fifth, and in a quiet way the most successful of all of the celebrities, Althea Nell Furst, who had written something like two hundred romantic suspense novels, all of which had the name of a bird in the title. She’d never hit the bestseller lists, but she had never been out of print, either, and there were legions of women out there somewhere who read the latest Althea Nell Furst, TV Guide, the National Enquirer, and that was it. Mrs. Furst (she was a widow) did look like a librarian, or the old-style grade school teacher. Her gray hair was done up on the top of her head in a bun, and she wore harlequin glasses with a string attached so she could hang them around her neck. The glasses didn’t hide the twinkle in her blue eyes, though, and when Mike and I stood to seat her, she beamed on us, as proud as if she’d taught us to do it herself.

  Mrs. Furst was traveling with her grandson, Neil. Neil, it seemed, had devoted approximately forty percent of his ten-year-old life to devouring action-adventure books. It turned out he was a devoted fan of all five of Mike Ryerson’s identities. He kept telling Judy how lucky she was to be married to him. Judy, a charming and quiet woman with light brown hair and eyes, said she knew. Neil started to ask Mike in detail about all his books. “In Flagellator Number Seven, Doom of Darkness, where Dirk cuts out the mugger’s heart with the steel-tipped whip—boy that was the greatest. How did you think of that?”

  His grandmother smiled indulgently at him, and let him go on until the food arrived. Mrs. Furst and Mike, each in his own way, made sure Jan and Kenni were in on the conversation. Kenni was loving it. Jan and Mrs. Furst appeared to be hitting it off. They were making plans for the day the ship got back to New York; apparently, one of Mrs. Furst’s major unfulfilled ambitions was to buy out a woolen shop in New York. Then Jan and Mike compared notes on Village bars, a subject of which they both seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge.

  At one point Mrs. Furst took Jan by the wrist. “Excuse me for interrupting, dear, but that man is staring at you. Don’t look at him now. Drop your napkin or something. Mr. Schaeffer must be quite taken with you.”

  Jan stared down at her Cornish hen. “I think it’s Matt he’s staring at, Mrs. Furst.”

  Mrs. Furst wore a look of scandalized glee. “Oh, goodness!”

  “It’s the Ping-Pong game,” I explained wearily. “He’s trying to psych me out.”

  “What does he expect you to do?” Neil wanted to know.

  “Tremble? The sixth-graders did the same thing to us in the cafeteria before the fifth-grade/sixth-grade soccer match.”

  “What did you do?” Kenni asked.

  “Stuck our tongues out at them.”

  I laughed. “Like this?” I said. I caught Shaeffer’s eye and stuck my tongue out at him. The look on his face was worth the trip. Everybody at the table burst out laughing.

  Jan asked Neil what happened in the game.

  “Oh,” he said casually, “they massacred us. But not ’cause we were psyched out. It was because they had a couple of retards who should be in eighth grade by now who kept running over us.”

  “What is his problem, anyway?” I wondered aloud.

  “Jolson syndrome,” Mike said.

  Kenni giggled. “I’m sorry, I just couldent shake the image of him on one knee singing ‘Mammy.’ ”

  “That’s not what I meant. I used to work for William Morris before
I got fired for excessive tallness. Some of the old-timers there used to talk about Jolson. Jolson never hung around with anybody else in show business. He could be the sweetest guy in the world with his friends, but his friends were exclusively real-estate men and used-car salesmen and people like that. He avoided other entertainers like the plague. One of the old-timers said that Jolson went nuts at the idea that there was anyone else the public could love.”

  Mrs. Furst nodded. “You know, I wondered about that. I remembered a nice young man named Schaeffer who used to talk to me at Mystery Writers of America meetings. We got quite friendly. I was wondering if this was the same one, because he’s barely said hello to me.”

  “Hell,” Mike said, then shot a look at Mrs. Furst. She didn’t seem to mind, so he went on. “I fixed him up with his first agent. We used to go to bars in the Village and commiserate when whatever coed was the current light of his life had snuffed him out. He’s the only person I ever met who’d talk about Raymond Chandler whenever he was drunk.”

  Mike pursed his lips as though he’d reminded himself of something. He took a small sip from a glass containing a clear liquid and a slice of lime, and went on.

  “And I used to look at his manuscripts. One day he handed me one that was a competent Chandler rip-off instead of an embarrassment, I gave him the name of a short former colleague at William Morris, and the rest is history.”

  “How does that relate to Al Jolson?” Kenni wanted to know.

  Mike grinned over the top of another sip. “Oh. Sorry. The point I was trying to make is, outside of mumbling hello, he doesn’t talk to me anymore, either.”

  Mike had Jan convinced. She was nodding unconsciously, as though she knew the type.

  “See, when I was publishing and he wasn’t, it was okay for us to be friends. As soon as he started doing the same thing I did, I was competition and it wasn’t.”