Killed in Paradise Page 7

  “Something to do with the mystery is supposed to happen at breakfast this morning.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said. “We don’t have to wear a tuxedo to breakfast, do we?”

  We were the last ones to arrive at the dining room. The adversity of the night before had made us comrades, and we greeted each other warmly. I scanned the room. Watson Burkehart was standing near the far wall, as far from us as it was possible to get, and if he had any brains he’d stay there.

  Jan cooed her hello, and greeted Kenni and me with a knowing smile that I found kind of irritating. Kenni blushed again. I was beginning to think she probably blushed when she peeled a banana.

  Mike Ryerson had an elbow on the table, holding his chin up. His eyes looked like the circle-of-red, circle-of-white, center-of-blue device the RAF paints on the wings of their airplanes. Neil Furst, who this morning was sitting at the right hand of his idol, was looking at the man with naked hero worship.

  “Mr. Ryerson showed me how the casinos work,” Neil explained.

  Judy Ryerson grinned ruefully. “The old scoutmaster here was going to show Neil the evils of gambling.”

  “Now, Judy,” Althea Nell Furst said. “I agreed, that since Neil seemed so fascinated, he should be shown it firsthand by someone he admired, rather than hustled on some street corner by a three-card-monte dealer. What happened was simply...unfortunate.”

  I turned to Mike. “So what happened?”

  “I won six hundred bucks.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That is unfortunate.”

  “I’ll say. I almost feel obligated to do this every night and show him what a fluke it was.”

  “I just wanted to see,” Neil protested. “I never said I wanted to gamble.”

  “Good for you, kid,” Mike said. “If you’re gonna bet, bet on sure things. Like Cobb here at Ping-Pong.” He turned to me. “I would like to thank you, Matt. You added ten years of my life when you pushed in that conceited bastard’s—pardon me, Mrs. Furst—stuck-up nose. Or took ten years off his, which is just as good.”

  Althea Nell Furst peered through her harlequin spectacles. “The conceited bastard in question—and pardon me, Mr. Ryerson”—she smiled—“does not seem to be here this morning.”

  “He’s supposed to be,” Jan said. “It said on the game sheet that the suspects were supposed to be here, so that they could answer questions better during the grilling sessions.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Furst said sweetly, “he really has no one else to alienate but the Palmers, now, does he?”

  It occurred to me that I never wanted to get this woman upset with me.

  Food came. I’d never hit the midnight buffet last night, thanks to Kenni, and while the Food of Love is terrific, it doesn’t stick to your ribs like a good corned beef sandwich. I was glad now that Kenni had insisted on coming to the dining room—I could tie into double orders of pancakes, back bacon, and home-fried potatoes without having to share. In situations like that, I am a nose-down kind of eater, and I more or less withdrew from the conversation while my tablemates discussed which of Billy and Karen’s suspects was going to get it this morning, and how.

  I was sitting up to arrange space for the last forkful of potatoes when the yelling came from the kitchen.

  “You t’ink I don’t know what you do wit dem, you crazier dan you are ugly! You sell my cookware on St. David’s, you t’ief.” Then came the magic words. “If I still had my knives, I cut you up wit’ dem.”

  It was as if I could see a hundred light bulbs go on over a hundred heads. Threats, I could almost hear them thinking. Threats of violence. Threats of violence in a loud, theatrical voice.

  A hundred mystery buffs rose as one and went to the kitchen. I was puzzled; Billy and Karen’s mysteries were famous for not depending for their solutions on someone getting an unobstructed view of some enacted event. They reasoned that everybody who paid money should have an even chance at the prize. Found bodies were much more their style than flamboyant threats.

  I turned to look at the next table, realizing even as I moved my head that they wouldn’t be there. Of course not. They’d be in the kitchen, making sure everything went according to plan.

  But there they were, solid in their seats, looking shocked and confused.

  That’s when I went into the kitchen.

  Please do not get the wrong impression. I am not the sort who rushes to the scene of trouble heedless of his own safety. If that’s the kind of person I was, I would have become a fireman, the way I wanted to when I was six. I would have stayed in the army.

  I went into the kitchen because Kenni Clayton, Guest of the Network and inveterate mystery fan, had been practically the first one in there, and she had dragged with her Janice Cullen, Network Contest Winner. I felt instinctively that Marv Bachman would regard either or both of them getting killed, or even hurt, as Bad Publicity. There were personal considerations, too.

  I elbowed my way through the crowd, getting cursed and threatened until I said, “Let me through, I’m part of the show,” in a loud stage whisper. This, I decided, was what Moses must have said to the Red Sea. I reached the scene of the action in no time.

  A large fat man wearing a chef’s hat and a very perturbed expression was waving a broken Worcestershire sauce bottle in the vicinity of the throat of Mr. Watson Burkehart, Acting Chief Dining Room Steward. Burkehart was leaning backward over a pile of dead, plucked ducks which seemed to be on their way toward becoming tonight’s dinner. From the grimace and the drops of sweat on his dark face, it was apparent that he expected to be a dead duck himself, and soon.

  “All the time you torment me, boy. Educated boy. University boy. I remember you walkin’ down the street wit’ a ratchet in your waist waiting for a tourist to come by, now you’re a big mon in the ship, steal from Islanders, now.”

  He went on, saying the bloody Swedes would make him pay for the missing knives, but Watson Burkehart would pay first.

  In the short time I had been exposed to the Acting Chief Dining Room Steward, I had found little to admire. He was not, however, a fool. “Clem,” he said. “Clem, my old friend. I don’t know what happened to your knives, but I’ll help you pay for them. I’ll pay for them myself.”

  Clem made a gesture with the broken bottle. “You say dat now.”

  “I’ll—I’ll pass the hat. Take up a collection.”

  Clem hesitated. I stepped in.

  “Sure,” I said. “Put me in for five bucks. Make it ten.”

  Clem looked at me. “Why you want to mix in? What are all dese people doin’ ’ere?”

  “Don’t want to see you in jail,” I said. “The food on this trip is too good, and I understand you’re the man who cooks it.”

  “I can’t cook wit’out my tools.”

  “Get new tools on the Island,” I told him. “Let Burkehart go, tell the purser what you suspect. You cut him, you’ll go to jail, lose your job. Is it worth it?”

  “For a t’ief? No way.” Without looking, Clem threw the broken bottle over his shoulder, scoring a basket in a large garbage bin against the wall. He continued to loom over Burkehart. “You get out of ’ere now, you ’ear me? You may be a big mon in the dining room, but I see you in my kitchen again, I’ll run you t’rough the meat grinder.”

  Burkehart fled, but not before he gave me a curious look, something halfway between gratitude and suspicion. To hell with him, I thought. I got my charges out of here without bloodshed.

  Clem started to laugh. It was strong laughter, strong as his anger had been.

  “T’ank you, mon. I won’t go to jail for the likes of him, dat t’ief. My cousin’s boy; I got him his first job with the Swedes, and look how he t’anks me.”

  He stuck out his hand; I took it. “Why do you think he was the one who took your knives?”

  “I know he did it.”

  “How do you know?” I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything, just giving Burkehart time to make his escape.

  “ ’Caus
e besides me, he’s the only one that have a key.” He rubbed his chin. “You really like the food, huh? And dese people, dey like it, too?”

  I turned to look. The rabid mystery fans were still there. Half of them had little notebooks.

  My friends, the couple from Chicago, were nearby. I looked at the wife’s notebook. She had written “Cobb likes the food,” and underlined it three times.

  10

  “It’s right, what you did. It’s wrong how you did it.”

  —Herb Edelman

  “The Good Guys” (CBS)

  “LOOK,” I SAID. “I’M sorry. I was just trying to keep a real murder from happening.”

  “That part was a good idea,” Karen said. We were in the Palmers’ cabin up on A deck. It was midmorning, so the disco, thank God, was quiet. From the look of the two of them, they hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep. They kept consoling themselves with the knowledge that shipboard entertainment, by law, had to cease while we were docked in Davidstown, which would give them a couple of nights to sleep, at least.

  “And,” I went on, “it’s not my fault Clem went crazy when he did.”

  “Did you have to tell them you were part of the show?” Billy asked plaintively. “Every time I deny it now, I get called a liar.” His tone gave the impression he didn’t like it.

  “I don’t know if I had to. It was the first thing I could think of that worked.”

  “I hope this Burkehead appreciates what we’ve all gone through to save his worthless life,” Karen said.

  “Burkehart,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. When I dislike somebody that much, I make a note of his name. Don’t you like him, either?”

  Karen dropped her voice confidentially. “He gives me the creeps. I don’t like people who are polite in snotty ways.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “To my table, he was snotty in a polite way.”

  She laughed. “Maybe you should have let him be killed.”

  Billy gave out with a yawn that made a nearly complete circle of his moustache, then gave out with a sigh. “The one I feel sorry for,” he said, “is Bob Madison.”

  Karen started to giggle. “Poor Bob.”

  I asked what happened, and Billy explained. “He was our victim. Cyanide poisoning in his breakfast. Nobody noticed. There he was, blue makeup on his face, slumped over with his cheek in a plate of scrambled eggs, and nobody saw him at all.”

  “So what have we got here?” Karen said. “We’ve got a murder that’s part of the game that nobody saw. They’re supposed to grill suspects this afternoon, what are they going to ask them?”

  “That’s easy,” Billy said. “They’ll ask me about the totally irrelevant scene in the kitchen, which they refuse to believe is not part of the game. Thanks to Matt. No hard feelings.”

  No, I thought, just guilt.

  “And if that’s not enough, we’ve got one of our celebrity guests sulking.”

  “You get one guess who,” Billy told me.

  Time to defend myself. “Hold the phone a minute, Bill. You’re the one who made the goddam Olympic Games out of a simple grudge match.”

  “Schaeffer told me it was supposed to be friendly! I didn’t know you hated each other’s guts! You’d only met five or six hours before, for God’s sake.”

  “I was bowled over by Schaeffer’s anti-charisma. What do you mean he’s sulking? I didn’t see him at breakfast, but what else?”

  “He didn’t go to Phil and Nicola’s speech this morning,” Karen said. “It’s sort of traditional that the writers turn out to hear each other.”

  “The news I get is that he doesn’t like other writers.”

  “He’s done mysteries with us before—he’s always gone. And he doesn’t answer the door, and he doesn’t answer the phone—I’ve even had him paged.”

  “Well, don’t panic,” I said. “I doubt he jumped overboard over a stupid Ping-Pong game.”

  Billy nodded, eyes wide, lips tight. “Well,” he said, “if he doesn’t show up in costume to be grilled as a suspect this afternoon, I’m going to drop him overboard myself. If I ever find him.”

  “Meanwhile,” Karen said, “the whole mystery we spent a month writing is messed up. What are we going to do about that?”

  “I have a suggestion,” I said.

  Billy said, “It’s the least you could do,” but he was smiling. That was a good sign. I’ve never seen him actually lose his temper, but even his smoulder is scary.

  “Move everything back a day.”

  “But that would mean a grilling session while we were docked,” Karen protested. “We didn’t want to do that.”

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that a bunch of people who will get up in the middle of breakfast and cram into a hot kitchen in the hope of seeing some fake bloodshed will not mind too terribly giving up an hour or two on the beach. You are dealing with fanatics here.”

  “Tell me about it,” Billy said. Then he started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Karen demanded.

  “I was just imagining the look on Bob Madison’s face when I tell him he has to nosedive the eggs again.”

  But not only did he dive back into the eggs the following morning, he came back from the dead to become one of the suspects in his own death, replacing the character who was to have been played by Lee H. Schaeffer, who was still making himself scarce. More than scarce. Out of a masochistic sense of curiosity I started looking around for him.

  Kenni thought it was a silly idea. “If you found him, the only thing you’d accomplish is to have him back again, making everybody miserable.”

  I had to concede her point. “But,” I said, “look at the education we’re getting about the ship.”

  Jan would smile at this point, something that took a lot of effort on her part, because as the seas got rougher, our contest winner got sicker. “I never should have given up on airplanes,” she said frequently. “Kenni doesn’t want to learn about the ship, she wants to solve that stupid mystery. Whoops.” Then she’d struggle to her feet and run to the bathroom, and Kenni and I would go find something else to do.

  Kenni and I had already discussed that aspect of things. She’d work her way through the Palmers’ mystery, but only for personal satisfaction—she wouldn’t go for the prize. This time, she did have an unfair advantage, and I had given it to her. She knew for a fact (or, perhaps more accurately, accepted as a belief) that the disappearance of Mr. Schaeffer, like Clem’s run-in with Watson Burkehart, was not a part of the game.

  God knows nobody else believed it. Any time I tried to ask anyone if they’d seen Schaeffer, I would get answers like, “What if I have?” or “Do your own detecting.” The most forthcoming response I got was from an obnoxious little twerp with acne and a pop-culture master’s thesis on Food Symbolism in the Private Eye Novels of Lee H. Schaeffer in full-blown progress, who said he would sue if Schaeffer did not turn up in time to (a) give his speech, (b) sign all the first editions of Stephen Shears books the twerp had brought with him, and (c) answer about sixty-seven thousand questions about the significance to Schaeffer’s character of baking muffins without tunnels or peaks. The twerp was convinced it was sexual symbolism—a subtle way of showing that when the macho man is forced into sensitivity, resentment of women must surface somewhere—but he didn’t think his professor would go for it without Schaeffer’s backing him up. To get the answer to this, he had spent x dollars for this cruise, and if he were fobbed off with writers of mere mystery stories, all his money would have been wasted, and he would be damned sure to get it back.

  “There’s probably a very good academic reason for this,” I said, “so forgive my naiveté. Why didn’t you just spend twenty-two cents and write him a letter?”

  The twerp scratched a zit at the corner of his mouth. I was not as queasy as Jan was, but I wasn’t on the greatest of terms with my alimentary canal. I wished he would stop, before I had to hit him or throw him o
verboard or something.

  “I did,” he whined. “He didn’t answer. I think he must have me confused with a fan or something.” He brought a few more fingers into play.

  “That wouldn’t be fair,” I said conversationally. “By the way, if you pop that thing, I’m going to kill you.”

  Amazingly, he didn’t want to talk anymore after that. He just repeated his threats and twerped off back to wherever he came from.

  “You see?” Kenni said. “I told you I couldent understand why you want to look for that man. Even his fans are obnoxious.”

  “That’s not fair, either,” I told her. “Billy and Karen think he’s great.”

  “As a writer.”

  “Even I thought he was okay as a writer, if you like the same old private eye story dressed up with a little eighties angst.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think you’re the angst type, Matt. You’re not looking for him to ensure the world’s supply of angst.”

  “No,” I confessed. “I’m looking for him because I think he’s a son of a bitch, and I think he’s up to something.”

  A light came into Kenni’s eyes. I should have told her this days ago, it would have saved me angst. Because this was different. This was a Plot, a Puzzle, and she and I were going to solve it.

  “What do you think he’s up to?” she asked. “Besides hiding his face in shame, I mean.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Haven’t you ever known anybody like Schaeffer before?”

  “Not so bad.”

  “You’ve led a sheltered and fortunate life. Blusterers are ace rationalizers. Schaeffer made a fool of himself. He knew it, I knew it, everybody knew it. Ordinarily, that would be good for one night’s embarrassment. Next morning, he’d be in sick bay, complaining of an eye infection, or he’d have a cast put on his hand. He’d put out a story of how I cheated him, and how he’d see to it that I never got the chance to hustle anybody at Ping-Pong again.”

  Kenni looked thoughtful. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re right. That would be just like him. Now that you put it that way, it’s weird that he hasn’t done something like that. Something to put him back in a favorable light with his fans. I wouldent think he could live this long without his adoring fans.”